Preamble

The House met at a Quarter before Three of the Clock, Mr. SPEAKER in the Chair.

PRIVATE BUSINESS.

Stockport Extension Bill.

To be read the Third time upon Tuesday, 29th May.

London County Council (Money) Bill (by Order).

Second Reading deferred till Wednesday, 30th May, at half-past Seven of the clock.

MEXBOROUGH AND SWINTON TRACTION (TROLLEY VEHICLES) PROVISIONAL ORDER BILL,

"to confirm a Provisional Order made by the Minister of Transport under the Mexborough and Swinton Tramways Act, 1926, relating to Mexborough and Swinton Traction Company's Trolley Vehicles," presented by Lieut.-Colonel Headlam; read the First time; and referred to the Examiners of Petitions for Private Bills, and to be printed. [Bill 121.]

SOUTHEND-ON-SEA CORPORATION (TROLLEY VEHICLES) PROVISIONAL ORDER BILL,

"to confirm a Provisional Order made by the Minister of Transport under the Southend-on-Sea Corporation Act, 1926, relating to Southend-on-Sea Corporation Trolley Vehicles," presented by Lieut.-Colonel Headlam; read the First time; and referred to the Examiners of Petitions for Private Bills, and to be printed. [Bill 122.]

PIER AND HARBOUR PROVISIONAL ORDERS (CLACTON-ON-SEA AND SAINT MAWES) BILL,

"to confirm certain Provisional Orders made by the Minister of Transport under the General Pier and Harbour Act, 1861, relating to Clacton-on-Sea and Saint Mawes," presented by Lieut.-Colonel Headlam; read the First time; and referred to the Examiners of Petitions for
Private Bills, and to be printed. [Bill 123.]

Oral Answers to Questions — UNEMPLOYMENT.

FOREIGN ARTISTES (ENTRY PERMITS).

Mr. DENVILLE: 1.
asked the Minister of Labour the grounds on which he reversed the decision at which he arrived after consultation with British Equity to prohibit the appearance of the Viennese chorus at Covent Garden?

The MINISTER of LABOUR (Sir Henry Betterton): I was satisfied that the addition of these singers to the chorus—which I would remind my hon. Friend is otherwise British—was necessary, if the production was to be fully successful; and also that they would not displace British singers. For these reasons, I decided to issue the permits.

Mr. DENVILLE: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that these singers displaced British artistes who are now walking the streets starving?

Captain CAZALET: Is it a fact that this opera has employed over 400 English people for this season alone?

Sir H. BETTERTON: Yes, Sir, that is true. I cannot say as to 400, but I know it has employed some hundreds. With regard to the first supplementary question, of course, I always do what I can to protect the rights of British artistes. At the same time, I have, in every case, to consider whether the production itself is likely to be strengthened by the addition of external players.

BEVERLEY TRAINING HOSTEL.

Brigadier-General NATION: 2.
asked the Minister of Labour whether, in view of the recent inspection of the Beverley training hostel for boys by officials from the Ministries of Labour and Agriculture, he is now in a position to make a statement regarding the proposals submitted to him by the Young Men's Christian Association; and will he be able to continue to give his support to this scheme for training boys?

Sir H. BETTERTON: I have informed the association that I am prepared to continue the existing agreement at the present rate of grant for a limited period. I cannot hold out any hope that it will be possible to increase the rate of grant.

TRANSITIONAL PAYMENTS (PUBLIC ASSISTANCE SUPPLEMENT).

Mr. LAWSON: 6.
asked the Minister of Labour if it is the policy of his Department that persons receiving transitional payment should be able to have their allowance supplemented by public assistance without such transitional payments being reduced accordingly?

Sir H. BETTERTON: The question whether in any case transitional payments require to be supplemented by public assistance is one for the competent authorities to decide, having regard to the needs of the household concerned.

Mr. LAWSON: Is the right hon. Gentelman aware that the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Labour, alluding to the cases of two people who broadcast last Saturday or last weekend, stated that those people could have received supplementary allowances; is he also aware that both those people deny that statement, and in view of the situation, has he made, or is he making, investigation into the matter?

Sir H. BETTERTON: I was not present in the House when that statement was made, although, of course, I read it. I think that what the Parliamentary Secretary said described what actually takes place. There is no doubt that public assistance is given, in addition to transitional payments, if, in a particular case, the public assistance authorities decide that such supplementation is necessary or is required.

Mr. LAWSON: But is the right hon. Gentleman aware that these people to whom I refer had made all the efforts which they could make in that direction, or stated so at any rate; and that that statement was given a denial by the Parliamentary Secretary in the House; and, in view of the fact that this is a very important matter, because the British Broadcasting Corporation is involved, is
the right hon. Gentleman making any inquiries upon these facts?

Sir H. BETTERTON: There is some confusion here. I understand that from 3,000 to 4,000 people in Durham are, in fact, receiving this supplement.

Mr. LAWSON: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the commissioner's own statement this morning proves the truth of what I say?

PUBLIC ASSISTANCE.

Mr. D. GRENFELL: 24.
asked the Minister of Health if he can give an estimate of the additional expenditure incurred by public assistance committees in Glamorganshire for the provision of medical services and treatment, including maternity services, to unemployed persons who have ceased to be eligible for medical benefits under the National Health Insurance Acts?

The MINISTER of HEALTH (Sir Hilton Young): I will commuicate with the public assistance authorities in this county, and will let the hon. Member have such information as is available.

Mr. LAWSON: Would it be possible to make a general inquiry?

Sir H. YOUNG: No, I think a general inquiry would not be possible.

Mr. SMEDLEY CROOKE: 25.
asked the Minister of Health if he will issue a circular to all public assistance committees recommending an upward revision of scales of benefit in all cases similar to that to which his attention has recently been called by the hon. Member for Deritend (Mr. Smedley Crooke) in which an unemployed man is at present being compelled to try and maintain himself, his wife, and five children on an average amount, after deduction of rent, of 4s. per head per week?

Sir H. YOUNG: I am causing inquiry to be made into this case and will communicate further with my hon. Friend as to it.

SMALLHOLDINGS (GOVERNMENT ASSISTANCE).

Colonel CLIFTON BROWN: 44.
asked the Minister of Agriculture whether he is
in a position to make any statement regarding suggestions which have been put before the Government for the provision on an experimental basis of a certain number of smallholdings for unemployed persons?

The MINISTER of AGRICULTURE (Mr. Elliot): I have been in touch with the voluntary bodies and other persons interested in this subject, and as a result, the possibility of constituting a Smallholdings Association for England and Wales is being actively considered. The immediate object of such an association would be to provide, by way of experiment, a number of smallholdings for intensive cultivation by suitable unemployed persons. In the event of such an association being formed the Government would be prepared to contribute up to £50,000 per annum over a period of three years on a basis of £l for every £2 raised by the association by way of gift in money or its equivalent from non-State sources. In this connection, I am glad to be able to inform the House that Mr. P. Malcolm Stewart has signified his willingness to offer to such an association, if and when formed, on the basis indicated, an estate of some 700 acres at Potten in Bedfordshire.

Estimates of the numbers of insured persons in employment in individual industries are only available for June of each year. The following Table gives the estimated numbers of insured persons, aged 16 to 64, in employment in the Hosiery and Lace Industries in Great Britain at June for the years 1931, 1932 and 1933 and the numbers of insured workpeople in these industries recorded as unemployed at the end of April in each of the years 1931–1934.


Year.
Estimated numbers of insured persons in employment* at the end of June of each year.
Numbers of insured persons recorded as unemployed at the end of April of each year.


Hosiery.
Lace.
Hosiery.
Lace.


1931
…
…
89,500
13,000
23,248
3,388


1932
…
…
97,500
14,000
14,436
1,973


1933
…
…
99,500
13,500
20,956
2,930


1934
…
…
—
—
13,678
1,717


* These figures include persons absent from work owing to sickness.

UNEMPLOYMENT BILL.

Mr. HOLDSWORTH: 7.
asked the Minister of Labour the date fixed for the coming into operation of the Unemployment Bill?

HOSIERY AND LACE WORKERS.

Mr. CAPORN: 4 and 5.
asked the Minister of Labour (1) how many persons registered as hosiery workers were employed and unemployed, respectively, at or about the end of April in each of the four years ending 1934, and
(2) how many persons registered as lace workers were employed and unemployed, respectively, at or about the end of April in each of the four years ending 1934?

Sir H. BETTERTON: As the reply includes a table of figures I will, if I may, circulate a statement in the OFFICIAL REPORT.

Mr. CAPORN: May I ask the right hon. Gentleman whether the figures show a rise in employment for the period in 1932 and a fall in the same period of 1933?

Sir H. BETTERTON: Yes, Sir.

Mr. CAPORN: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that during the first period the import duties in the case of hosiery were 50 per cent. and in the latter 20 per cent., and will he direct the attention of his Cabinet colleagues to the significance of these figures?

Following is the reply :

Sir H. BETTERTON: Part I of the Bill will come into operation generally one month after it is passed, but (a) Clause 5, which restores the benefit rates, will take effect on 1st
July, (b) Clause 17, which provides for the establishment of the Statutory Committee, will come into operation on the passing of the Bill, (c) Clause 18, which deals with Treasury advances to the Unemployment Fund, will come into operation on 1st July if Part I is not then generally in operation, (d) Clause 1, which lowers the age for entry into insurance, will come into operation on 3rd September, unless some earlier date is appointed by order. No statement can yet be made as regards the appointed days under Part II of the Bill.

Mr. HOLDSWORTH: Can the right hon. Gentleman say when he expects the Bill to have passed through the other House?

Sir H. BETTERTON: I should hope about the third week in June. That is the date which I have in mind.

Oral Answers to Questions — ENFIELD ROLLING MILLS (DISPUTE).

Mr. THORNE: 3.
asked the Minister of Labour whether he has received a report in connection with a dispute at the Enfield Rolling Mills, Brimsdown, Middlesex; whether any of his officials have interviewed the management of the firm with a view to bringing the responsible officials of both sides together for the purpose of settling the dispute; and whether the firm in question have any Government contracts and are working under the fair wage clause?

Sir H. BETTERTON: The answer to the first two parts of the question is in the affirmative. As regards the last part of the question, I would refer the hon. Member to the reply given by the Financial Secretary to the Treasury to the hon. Member for Stratford (Mr. Groves) on 8th May, of which I am sending him a copy.

Mr. THORNE: Can the right hon. Gentleman say whether anyone from his Department has interviewed the management or tried to bring the parties together with a view to settling this matter?

Sir H. BETTERTON: I am in close touch with this matter, and I am sure the hon. Member will appreciate the fact
that it would not be advisable to say more at this stage

Oral Answers to Questions — EMPLOYMENT OF PRISONERS (COMMITTEE'S REPORT).

Captain CUNNINGHAM - REID: 8.
asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department if the departmental committee on the employment of prisoners has presented its report; and, if so, what is the nature of such report?

The SECRETARY of STATE for the HOME DEPARTMENT (Sir John Gilmour): The committee have submitted a report dealing with the first part of their terms of reference, namely, the methods of employing prisoners, and this report was presented to Parliament and published in November last (Cmd. 4462). They are still investigating the second question which they were asked to consider, namely, that of assisting prisoners to find employment on discharge

Oral Answers to Questions — PROTECTION OF ANIMALS ACT (PROPOSED RODEO).

Mr. DAVID GRENFELL: 9.
asked the Home Secretary whether he has considered the list sent to him from the rodeo protest committee, of over 500 representatives and distinguished people, who desired that the persons and animals employed in the proposed rodeo should be refused permission to enter this country; whether he has acceded to the request to receive a deputation on the subject; whether any of the rodeo personnel have already arrived in this country; and whether be will issue immediate instructions that they be returned to their respective countries?

Sir J. GILMOUR: Yes, Sir, I received the list on the 10th instant. So far as I am aware, none of the participants in the proposed rodeo have as yet arrived in this country, but as it was necessary to come to an immediate decision it has not been possible for me to arrange to receive a deputation from the committee referred to. Having received a definite assurance from the promoters that the provisions of the new Protection of Animals Bill will be strictly observed, I have decided, after consultation with my right hon. Friend the Minister of Labour,
that facilities for the participants to come to the United Kingdom may be given.

Mr. GRENFELL: Is there anybody in this country, apart from the promoters of this show, who want these things to come to this country?

Oral Answers to Questions — PROSECUTION, BIRKENHEAD (SERVICE OF SUMMONS).

Mr. DOBBIE: 11.
asked the Home Secretary if his attention has been called to the case of a summons being served on a man at Birkenhead at the place of his employment instead of being served at his present address, this action of the police in so serving the summons causing the man to lose his situation; and will he take the necessary action to prevent the serving of a summons in this manner in the future?

Sir J. GILMOUR: My attention had not previously been called to this case, but I have made inquiries and am informed that a summons was served on this defendant at his place of employment only after two unsuccessful attempts had been made to serve it at the address given by him. His employer has stated that his dismissal was not in any way due to the service of the summons, of which the employer was not aware. It was due to the defendant's misconduct in neglecting his duties, and I see no occasion for any action on my part in the matter.

Mr. PIKE: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the service of summonses in many parts of the country is not carried out with strict regard to the law; and will he make inquiries with a view to alleviating the distress which is sometimes caused by the service on a wife of a summons which is really in respect of the husband?

Oral Answers to Questions — LANCASHIRE CONSTABULARY (DISCIPLINARY ACTION).

Mr. STONES: 12.
asked the Home Secretary if he is aware that the circumstances under which Chief-Inspector Easton and Detective-Sergeant Bond, of the Lancashire Constabulary, stationed at Farnworth, have been reduced in rank, and Sergeant Crowther, of the same
force, has been fined, have aroused resentment throughout the Bolton petty sessional division; and whether he will call for a further investigation into the whole circumstances of the case?

Sir J. GILMOUR: My hon. Friend brought this case to my notice, but I have received no other representations about it. The disciplinary authority in a county police force is placed by statute in the hands of the Chief Constable, and it is not within my province to review his decision in individual cases of this kind.

Lord BALNIEL: In cases like this and the similar case of Police Constable Robinson recently, in which considerable public interest was aroused, is it not possible for the right hon. Gentleman to institute a public inquiry?

Sir J. GILMOUR: I think it is quite unnecessary.

Mr. RHYS DAVIES: In view of the very severe punishment meted out to these officers at Farnworth, cannot the right hon. Gentleman, even if he had no statutory powers, communicate with the Chief Constable of Lancashire and use his good offices to get these men reinstated in their previous positions?

Sir J. GILMOUR: Certainly not.

Major JESSON: 17.
asked the Home Secretary whether he is aware of the discontent and apprehension that exist in the Lancashire County Police Force; and whether he will cause an inquiry to be held into the actions of the Chief Constable of Lancashire?

Sir J. GILMOUR: The answer to both parts of the question is in the negative.

Major JESSON: If I bring to the notice of my right hon. Friend evidence of the grossly excessive and cruel punishment that this Chief Constable is meting out to members of the force——

Mr. SPEAKER: I should not allow that question to be put on the Paper, and I cannot allow it to be put as a supplementary question.

Major JESSON: May I give notice that I intend to raise this question, with permission, on the Motion for the Adjournment of the House on some future occasion?

Major JESSON: 18.
asked the Home Secretary whether he will furnish the House with a return of the number of dismissals, rank reductions, and voluntary resignations in the Lancashire County Constabulary during the last two years?

Sir J. GILMOUR: The Chief Constable informs me that during the two years ending on 30th April last three members of his force were dismissed, 13 were ordered to resign as an alternative to dismissal, nine were reduced in rank, and 25 resigned for reasons of their own.

Major JESSON: Can the right hon. Gentleman say how that compares with other districts, with other counties?

Sir J. GILMOUR: Not without notice.

Major JESSON: Could you inform him that Lancashire is not Russia?

Mr. CAPORN: Is there not a right of appeal in these cases to the Home Secretary, and has that right of appeal been exercised?

Sir J. GILMOUR: Yes, there is a right of appeal.

Oral Answers to Questions — LICENSED HOURS (SUMMER TIME).

Captain PETER MACDONALD: 13.
asked the Home Secretary whether he will introduce a Bill during the current Session to remedy the situation which has been created by the decision of the Appeal Court with regard to the legality of special licensing hours during the summer in view of the adverse effect upon the tourist industry?

Sir J. GILMOUR: The Government have decided to introduce as soon as possible after the Recess a Bill to meet the situation created by the recent decision of the High Court. The Bill will enable an extension of the permitted hours from 10 to 10.30 p.m., at the discretion of the justices to be granted for a part of the year only as was provided in the Order which was the subject of the proceedings.

Captain MACDONALD: While thanking my right hon. Friend for his prompt action in this matter, may I ask him, in order to clarify the position which now exists, to state whether the High Court decision referred to in my question, only applies to that particular place
or to the 120 odd other orders issued by licensing justices throughout the country?

Sir J. GILMOUR: I have no authority to give any ruling on the point, but the advice given to me is that similar orders made by the licensing benches in other districts are not automatically rendered inoperative by the High Court decision.

Captain ARTHUR EVANS: May I ask my right hon. Friend whether this Bill will include within its terms the Principality of Wales?

Sir J. GILMOUR: Yes, Sir.

Oral Answers to Questions — ALIENS (FRANK MEYER).

Mr. MORGAN JONES: 14.
asked the Home Secretary whether he is aware that Frank Meyer, the student expelled from the London School of Economics, is still studying at the Anthropological Institute and the British Museum; and whether, therefore, as a bona fide student he may be afforded the same privileges as heretofore?

Sir J. GILMOUR: I would refer the hon. Member to the answer which I gave on the 10th instant to my hon. Friend the Member for St. Marylebone (Captain Cunningham-Reid). Mr. Meyer has permission to remain in this country until 31st instant, and I propose to await the decision of the governors of the school before considering the matter further.

Mr. JONES: As Mr. Meyer is at this moment conducting research, with a view to securing a degree, may I ask the right hon. Gentleman whether he will not reconsider that aspect of the case land allow him to remain here in order to complete his studies for his degree?

Sir J. GILMOUR: indicated dissent.

Captain CUNNINGHAM-REID: Is it not the fact that, if an Englishman had conducted himself in America in the same way as Mr. Meyer has conducted himself here, he would have been asked to leave immediately?

Oral Answers to Questions — FASCISTS' MEETINGS, NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE AND GATESHEAD.

Mr. THORNE: 16.
asked the Home Secretary whether he has received a report from the chief of police at New-castle-on-Tyne in connection with a national Fascist meeting where a number
of people were injured; if a report has been received from the chief of police at Gateshead in connection with a meeting held at Gateshead Town Hall on Monday night; and whether the Government has yet decided to prohibit members of any organisation wearing political uniforms?

Sir J. GILMOUR: As regards the first and last parts of the question, I would refer the hon. Member to the answer which I gave yesterday to a question by the hon. Member for Chester-le-Street (Mr. Lawson). I have obtained a report from the Chief Constable of Gateshead, in regard to the meeting referred to in the second part of the question, from which it appears that the principal speaker at this meeting was Mr. John Beckett; there was some disorder before the meeting, but none at the meeting itself or afterwards.

Mr. THORNE: Is the right hon. Gentleman not aware that the chief stewards at all these meetings are armed with indiarubber tubing and in some cases knuckle dusters, and, if these people are entitled to use this kind of weapon, in the name of common sense are not ordinary citizens entitled to use them also?

Mr. HERBERT WILLIAMS: Is my right hon. Friend aware that I was speaking at Upton the other night and that the Socialists made it almost impossible for me to be heard?

Mr. THORNE: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that on one Tuesday night it was almost impossible for me to speak?

Oral Answers to Questions — FILM CENSORSHIP.

Mr. LECKIE: 19.
asked the Home Secretary whether he is aware of the increasing dissatisfaction of the public with the laxity of the British Board of Film Censors in licensing films of a demoralising character, notwithstanding statements made in the annual report of 1931 that the president of the board had come to the conclusion that more drastic action would have to be taken in regard to such films in future; and if he will consider the introduction of legislation to set up an official censorship unconnected with the trade?

Sir J. GILMOUR: The answer to both parts of the question is in the negative.

Oral Answers to Questions — EDUCATION (PROVISION OF MEALS).

Mr. T. SMITH: 20.
asked the Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education if he will furnish as complete a return as the board's information allows of the approved income scales now in force in the various local education authorities' areas for determining which children shall receive free meals, under Sections 82–84 of the Education Act, 1921?

The PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the BOARD of EDUCATION (Mr. Ramsbotham): As explained in the reply given to the hon. Member on the 10th April, the information in the possession of the board is not reliable in the case of local education authorities who have been providing meals for a long period. It would, therefore, not be possible to furnish even an approximately complete return without obtaining from the various authorities information as to the income scales now in force.

Oral Answers to Questions — HOUSING.

BUILDING SOCIETIES (ADVANCES).

Mr. MITCHESON: 22.
asked the Minister of Health if he can furnish an estimate of the sum advanced by building societies in the year ended 31st March, 1934, to facilitate building operations under the provisions of the Housing Acts?

Sir H. YOUNG: I have no information except in so far as advances are made in respect of houses erected with the help of guarantees given in pursuance of Section 2 of the Housing Act, 1933. For this limited purpose the advances made by building societies up to 31st March, 1934, amounted to £442,360.

SLUM CLEARANCE.

Mr. CHORLTON: 23.
asked the Minister of Health if there is any regulation as to density in rehousing on site in slum-clearance schemes; and, in view of the desirability of these being at a maximum, will he make known to the various towns concerned the high percentage possible
that has been obtained in practice in re-housing when higher densities have been adopted?

Sir H. YOUNG: No, Sir. Each case is considered on its merits, having regard to the circumstances of the area and any town planning restrictions applicable to it. I think that local authorities are well aware of the position, and it does not seem to me to be necessary to take any special measures to call their attention to it.

Mr. CHORLTON: Will the right hon. Gentleman take special measures in future to advise the Manchester Corporation with respect to colliers' areas, in order that with the increased density the maximum number of people can be rehoused?

Sir H. YOUNG: I think the opportunities under the existing provisions are well known.

STATISTICS.

Mr. HOLDSWORTH: 21.
asked the Minister of Health how many houses built by private enterprise without subsidy during the six months ended 31st March, 1934, were built to let at weekly rentals of less than 8s. and 10s., exclusive of rates?

Sir H. YOUNG: Of the 120,781 houses provided by private enterprise without State assistance during the half-year referred to, 44,754 were of a rateable value not exceeding £13 (£20 in Greater London), and 22,730 were occupied by persons other than their owners. The statistics available do not include a classification of the house last mentioned according to the rents charged.

Mr. HOLDSWORTH: Can the right hon. Gentleman inform the House when he expects to introduce the new Housing Bill?

UNITED STATES (BRITISH DEBT).

Mr. HALES: 27.
asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether, having regard to the announcement by the United States Government that, although token payments on account of war debts will be accepted, such country making these payments will be considered a defaulter, he will give an assurance that in future no further payments will be made by Great Britain in excess of the amounts
we recover from our debtors as far as war debts are concerned?

The CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER (Mr. Neville Chamberlain): I would refer my hon. Friend to the answer which I gave on Tuesday last to the right hon. Member for South Molton (Mr. Lambert) and the hon. Member for Southampton (Mr. Craven-Ellis), to which I have nothing to add.

Mr. HALES: If these payments, which are not provided for, are to be continued without a corresponding collection of our war debts, will it not convert a surplus into a permanent deficit, which will have the gravest consequences in future years?

FOREIGN LOANS (EMBARGO).

Mr. E. J. YOUNG: 28.
asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether, in order that the Treasury may have fuller information to meet requests by flotation houses for the removal of the embargo upon the issue of foreign loans in London, he will now obtain and record the names of those houses responsible for the flotation of the defaulted pre-war and post-ward foreign loans included in the lists of defaulting borrowers issued last month by the Council of Foreign Bondholders?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: The ho". Member's question, if I understand it aright, involves an implication which I do not accept. In any event the information required is already published in various works of reference.

Oral Answers to Questions — TRADE AND COMMERCE.

EMPIRE DEVELOPMENT AND TRADE.

Captain FULLER: 29.
asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in view of the heavy commitments of the Dominions with us involving large adverse trade balances, a large proportion of which call for no corresponding export from this country, whether he will consult with the Dominions with a view to floating an Empire loan to convert these commitments at a lower interest and so make possible further Empire development and an approach to Empire Free Trade?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: While I have every sympathy with the objects which my hon. and gallant Friend has in mind,
I consider that the specific suggestion referred to in the question would not he either a practicable or a desirable method of attaining these objects. I am always ready to consider sympathetically any proposal by a Dominion Government for the conversion of a sterling loan, which it has an option to redeem, to a lower rate of interest, and I need not remind the House of the conspicuous and gratifying success which has already been achieved by the Commonwealth of Australia on these lines.

Captain FULLER: Has not my right hon. Friend any other suggestion in his mind which would bring about the desired object of the further settlement and development of the Empire?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: No, I do not think it is necessary to have any other procedure in mind.

IMPORT DUTIES.

Mr. CAPORN: 31.
asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether any applications for increased duties made to the Imports Duties Advisory Committee prior to the 31st December last are still awaiting the consideration and decision of the committee, and, if so, how many; and will he explain the reasons for the delay?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: I would refer my hon. Friend to the answer which was given on the 17th April to questions asked by the hon. Member" for East Leicester (Mr. Lyons) and West Leyton (Sir W. Sugden).

Mr. CAPORN: Is my right hon. Friend aware that there are feelings in many quarters that there is great delay in dealing with this matter, and cannot he obtain some information from the Committee which will enable this House to judge whether those feelngs are justified or not?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: Perhaps my hon. Friend will give me particulars of the cases in which he is interested.

Mr. CAPORN: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that there have been many instances given in questions raised in this House in the course of the last two or three months?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: Those matters were dealt with in the answer to which I have referred.

Captain DOWER: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the real exception is in the valid, good cases where our markets get flooded with goods in anticipation of the Advisory Committee's award?

IRON AND STEEL INDUSTRY (IMPORT DUTIES).

Mr. D. GRENFELL: 32.
asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether a decision has yet been reached as to extending the period of protection to the iron and steel industry for a further five years; whether this will be made conditional upon the drastic reorganisation of the industry; whether the iron and steel industry has drawn up any scheme of reorganisation for the Government's approval; if so, whether the workpeople's organisations connected with the industry have been consulted; whether the public, as the consuming interest, have been taken into consultation in drawing up the scheme; and whether the public will be represented in the scheme for the future control of the industry?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: An Order removing the present time limit to the iron and steel duties will be made to-day and will be laid on the Table of the House to-night. The various points raised by the hon. Member can, I think, best be discussed when, in accordance with the usual procedure, the Order is submitted to the House for an approving Resolution.

DENMARK.

Captain FULLER: 48 and 49.
asked the President of the Board of Trade (1) to what extent our adverse trade balance with Denmark could be reduced without jeopardising the receipt of interest on investments we may have there;
(2) to what extent our adverse balance of trade with Denmark is due to investments in British factories there; how many factories there are; and what amount of capital is involved?

The PRESIDENT of the BOARD of TRADE (Mr. Runciman): I would refer my hon. and gallant Friend to the answer which I gave him on 12th May, 1933.

LINSEED (IMPORTS).

Sir FRANK SANDERSON: 50.
asked the President of the Board of Trade whether his attention has been drawn to the decreased manufacture in this country of the products from linseed due to the decline in the importation of Argentine linseed from 64,647 tons in the three months ended 31st March, 1933, or 92,450 tons in the same period in 1932, to 18,599 tons in the same period in 1934, owing to the 10 per cent. duty imposed under the Ottawa Agreements on linseed other than that of Empire origin; and whether, as neither India nor any other country within the Empire is able to supply the needs of the United Kingdom, and as no heavier crops are likely to be produced in India, he will consider a revision of the agreement with a view to saving this industry?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: The decline in imports of linseed from Argentina has been accompanied by a rapid increase in imports from India, and I have no reason to suppose that this increase will not continue.

Sir F. SANDERSON: Is my right hon. Friend aware that Indian linseed does not compete in price with Argentine linseed; that there always was and is today a considerable premium on Argentine linseed, the premium being £2 per ton; and is he not also aware that while it is true——

Mr. SPEAKER: The hon. Member is now the giver of information and not requesting it.

IMPORT DUTIES, SPAIN (BRITISH GOODS).

Mr. HANNON: 51.
asked the President of the Board of Trade whether representations have been made to the Spanish Government on behalf of the British motor-cycle industry that the import duty on British motor-cycles should be on the same basis as those imposed upon motor-cycles from France and other countries, seeing that under the Franco-Spanish agreements the duties imposed on British cycles entering Spain have become prohibitive; and if any further action on the part of His Majesty's Government is contemplated?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: The Spanish import duties on French motor-cycles were reduced under a Franco-Spanish agreement of October, 1931, and United King-
dom motor-cycles obtained the benefit of this reduction by virtue of most-favourednation rights. As a result of the recent abrogation of this agreement, the former higher duties become automatically applicable both to French and United Kingdom motor-cycles. It appears possible that some modification may result from further negotiations between France and Spain. The position is being carefully watched from the point of view of the rights and interests of the United Kingdom trade.

Mr. HANNON: Is it not the fact that at the present moment the Franco-Spanish agreement means almost the complete prohibition of British motorcycles getting into Spain at all?

Mr. HANNON: 52.
asked the President of the Board of Trade whether, in view of the treatment accorded to British manufactured goods entering Spain, he will consider the desirability of increased tariffs on Spanish wine and fruit with the object of extending the production of these commodities in the British Empire?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: I have noted my hon. Friend's suggestion. The position is being closely watched.

Mr. HANNON: This is very important. Will the President of the Board of Trade use the instrument of the tariff to force the Spanish Government to give fair play to British manufacturers?

Sir ROBERT HAMILTON: Will the right hon. Gentleman say whether any tariff could succeed in producing Spanish wine in British Dominions?

GLASS BOTTLES AND JARS.

Mr. LIDDALL: 54.
asked the President of the Board of Trade whether his attention has been drawn to the fact that the imports of glass bottles and jars have gone up from 10,321 gross in April, 1932, to 32,795 gross in April, 1934; and what action he proposes to take?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: I am aware of the facts to which my hon. Friend draws attention. Any question of an increase in the duty on these goods must of course be dealt with by the ordinary procedure of the Import Duties Act.

Mr. LIDDALL: In view of the fact that the present duty is evidently not sufficient
to restrict the importation of these goods and to enable British manufacturers to compete with Continental makers, will the Government not take some action?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: Those facts were brought to the attention of the Import Duties Advisory Committee.

AGRICULTURAL MACHINERY.

Mr. LIDDALL: 55.
asked the President of the Board of Trade whether he is aware of the further increase in the importation of agricultural machinery during the month of April, 1934, when the imports totalled 650 tons as compared with 294 tons in the corresponding month of last year; and when the agricultural machinery manufacturers of Lincoln can expect further protection?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: I am aware of the facts to which my hon. Friend draws attention. As regards the last part of the question, there is nothing I can add to the reply which was given to him on the 8th May.

RUBBER FOOTWEAR.

Mr. BARTON: 53.
asked the President of the Board of Trade what steps he proposes to take to deal with industrial competition from British Colonies in the Far East, having regard to the fact that imports of rubber footwear from such countries increased from 11,112 pairs in April, 1933, to 296,772 pairs in April, 1934?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: This matter continues to receive close attention, but I am not at present in a position to add to the reply I gave on the 6th February to the hon. Member for South Croydon (Mr. II. Williams).

Oral Answers to Questions — BEET-SUGAR INDUSTRY.

Mr. MALLALIEU: 30.
asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer which beet-sugar factories were investigated in the actuarial investigation carried out on behalf of the Treasury in or about July, 1933, and what was the result of the investigation in each case?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: All the beet-sugar factories in the United Kingdom have allowed their books to be investigated by an independent firm of account-
ants on behalf of the Treasury, six in 1933 and the remainder in the current year. The accountants' reports have been communicated to the Greene Committee; pending that committee's report I do not think it desirable to make any further statement.

Mr. MALLALIEU: Will the right hon. Gentleman say whether that investigation shows the truth of the generally held belief that the Anglo-Scottish Beet-Sugar Corporation, run by Lord Weir, is an unsound and thoroughly ill-run concern, unworthy of public money being poured into it?

Oral Answers to Questions — ROYAL MINT (WORKERS' EYESIGHT).

Captain CUNNINGHAM - REID: 33.
asked the Financial Secretary to the Treasury if he is aware that the workmen in the Royal Mint working upon molten metal do not normally use the dark glasses issued to them for the protection of their eyesight, upon the grounds that the inner side of these glasses rapidly becomes coated with a film of moisture which interferes with vision; and whether he will see if it is possible to issue an improved type of dark glass not subject to this defect?

The FINANCIAL SECRETARY to the TREASURY (Mr. Hore-Belisha): The types of dark glasses have been carefully selected after considerable investigation and with expert advice on the question of eliminating moisture. I am advised that they give as good results as can be obtained. No complaint as to the serviceable nature of the glasses has been received from the staff concerned.

Oral Answers to Questions — HORSES (EXPORT).

Mr. H. WILLIAMS: 36.
asked the Minister of Agriculture if he is prepared to appoint a Departmental Committee to inquire into the allegations of cruelty in connection with the exportation of horses?

Mr. ELLIOT: The export trade in horses was thoroughly investigated in 1925 by a Departmental Committee which found that the Acts governing the shipment of horses from this country were being efficiently enforced, and that the regulations as to the transport by sea were satisfactory. The position has not
changed since then, and I see no reason for the appointment of a further committee.

Mr. WILLIAMS: Has my right hon. Friend received any specific allegations of cruelty from any of the organisations asking Parliament to pass a Bill?

Mr. ELLIOT: No, I cannot say that I have received any specific cases.

Oral Answers to Questions — AGRICULTURE.

MILK MARKETING BOARD (REGIONAL REPRESENTATIVES).

Captain A. EVANS: 37.
asked the Minister of Agriculture if he is aware that no printed copies of the list of registered milk producers are available for the use of candidates for election as regional representatives on the Milk Marketing Board, and copies can only be supplied at the cost of ½d. per name which, in the case of the south-eastern area, would amount to between £40 and £50; and if, in order that independent candidates can submit themselves for election, he will cause a roll of registered producers to be available at a reasonable cost?

Mr. ELLIOT: The amount of the fee to be charged for supplying extracts from the register of milk producers is a matter for the Milk Marketing Board, subject to the requirement that the fee shall not exceed one halfpenny for each entry copied. Any person may take extracts from the register for his own use free of charge. I have no power to intervene in this matter.

Captain EVANS: Does my right hon. Friend realise that this condition of affairs really means that it is absolutely impossible for an independent candidate who is not an official nominee of the National Farmers' Union to offer himself for election; and that, in view of the fact that the officials of the Milk Marketing Board are now using the roll for their own purposes, no candidate has sufficient time to get a copy for election purposes?

Mr. ELLIOT: Obviously I cannot debate the matter at Question Time. It is a matter for the registered producers and the board, and it is not a matter in which I have power to interfere.

Captain EVANS: In view of the very high cost of procuring an adequate copy
of the roll of electors, will my right hon. Friend represent this to the Milk Marketing Board officials with a view to its being rectified?

Mr. ELLIOT: I do not think my representations would have any more effect than those of my hon. and gallant Friend.

Brigadier-General BROWN: Is my right hon. Friend aware that in one case brought to my notice the other day it was calculated that it would cost £700 to put up their candidates for this election; and, if we want to get new blood on this board, will not my right hon. Friend look into the matter and see that these elections are put on a fair basis?

Mr. ELLIOT: These matters are subject to the provisions of the scheme, and I have no power to intervene in the matter.

SLAUGHTER-HOUSES.

Mr. LECKIE: 38.
asked the Minister of Agriculture whether he has yet come to any decision as to the appointment of a national slaughter-houses commission, as recommended in the recent report of the Reorganisation Commission for Fat Stock?

Mr. ELLIOT: I regret I am not in a position at present to add to the reply given by my right hon. Friend the Minister of Health on 4th May, to a question on this subject by my hon. Friend the Member for Gillingham (Sir B. Gower) of which I am sending the hon. Member a copy.

SKIMMED CONDENSED MILK.

Mr. MITCHESON: 40.
asked the Minister of Agriculture what subsidy, if any, is paid by the Netherlands Government or, alternatively, by any farmers' organisation in Holland in respect of the skimmed condensed milk shipped from that country to the United Kingdom?

Mr. ELLIOT: I understand that under the Netherlands Crisis Dairy Act there is a fund raised by means of a levy on sales in Holland of butter, margarine and other edible fats which is used for subsidising producers of milk for manufacture, but that there is no specific subsidy paid on skimmed condensed milk shipped from the Netherlands to the United Kingdom.

Mr. LAMBERT: Would my right hon. Friend be good enough to compile a list of subsidies paid by countries which compete with our agricultural products?

Mr. ELLIOT: IF my right hon. Friend will put down a question, I will do my utmost to give him the information.

LIVESTOCK INDUSTRY.

Mr. H. WILLIAMS: 42.
asked the Minister of Agriculture when he will be able to announce any further steps to deal with the livestock industry, having regard to the fact that the imports of beef in April, 1934, increased to 970,249 cwts. from 917,819 cwts. in April, 1933, and from 897,636 cwts. in April, 1932?

Sir ERNEST SHEPPERSON: 39.
asked the Minister of Agriculture if his attention has been drawn to the fact that the weight of beef imported in the four months ended 30th April was 7 per cent. higher than in the corresponding period last year; and what steps he proposes to take to deal with the situation?

Mr. ELLIOT: I am aware that imports of beef into the United Kingdom in April and in the four months January to April, 1934, were greater than in the corresponding periods of the last two years, due to larger supplies from Empire sources. The meat situation is at present under consideration in the light of the report of the Reorganisation Commission for Fat Stock.

Mr. WILLIAMS: Is it not the case that the reduction of imports from foreign countries this year as compared with last year has been almost negligible?

Mr. ELLIOT: I have answered the question which has been asked, and the fact is that the total supplies are larger and my hon. Friend knows very well from where they come.

Mr. WILLIAMS: Was it not the object of the Ottawa Agreements to increase the imports from Empire countries and to diminish them from foreign countries?

Mr. ELLIOT: That is exactly what is taking place. What does my hon. Friend object to?

Oral Answers to Questions — OYSTERS (CLEANSING, BRIGHTLINGSEA).

Sir JOHN PYBUS: 41.
asked the Minister of Agriculture whether he has received a report of the inauguration of the cleansing of oysters at Brightlingsea according to the method devised by his Department by means of an installation
provided by the Brightlingsea Urban District Council with their advice and approval; whether he is satisfied with the result; and whether he will take steps to secure the provision of similar installations in connection with other oyster fisheries?

Mr. ELLIOT: I have learned with satisfaction that the cleansing of oysters at Brightlingsea has been successfully initiated and is proceeding with excellent results. The technical officers of my Department will always be ready to advise and assist local authorities who may be disposed to follow the valuable lead given by the Brightlingsea Urban District Council.

Oral Answers to Questions — WORLD PEACE.

Captain CUNNINGHAM-REID: 45.
asked the Prime Minister whether the Government are considering the calling of another international conference to approach the problem of world peace from the angle of the security of the nations concerned in the event of the Disarmament Conference not achieving adequate results within measurable time?

The LORD PRESIDENT of the COUNCIL (Mr. Baldwin): No, Sir.

Oral Answers to Questions — HERRING FISHING INDUSTRY.

Rear - Admiral Sir MURRAY SUETER: 46.
asked the Secretary to the Overseas Trade Department whether any steps have been taken by his Department since 25th March to obtain increased offers from the Soviet authorities for salt herring; and, if so, will he state whether business has resulted?

Lieut.-Colonel J. COLVILLE (Secretary, Overseas Trade Department): I have lost no opportunity of impressing the importance of this matter on the Soviet trade representative in this country. As regards the second part of the question, although no business has yet resulted, I understand that negotiations are in progress.

Sir MURDOCH McKENZIE WOOD: Is the hon. and gallant Gentleman still in touch with the situation and doing what he can to assist in the negotiations?

Lieut.-Colonel COLVILLE: Yes, Sir.

Mr. HENDERSON STEWART: 57.
asked the President of the Board of Trade whether the negotiations with the German Government for increasing the quota on currency export have reached a conclusion; if so, with what result; and what hopes he holds out of an early reduction of the barrier to British export trade and particularly to the herring industry?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: I am not at present in a position to add to the reply I gave to a similar question by the hon. and gallant Member for Hertford (Sir M. Sueter) on the 15th May.

Mr. STEWART: In view of the depression in the industry and the great anxiety with regard to this obstacle, can the President of the Board of Trade hold out hopes of an early and more favourable reply?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: I am afraid I can say nothing more at present.

Mr. STEWART: 58.
asked the Secretary of State for Scotland whether the negotiations with Russia for the sale of herrings during the present year have reached a conclusion; and, if so, with what result?

The UNDER-SECRETARY of STATE for SCOTLAND (Mr. Skelton): No, Sir. I understand that the negotiations are still in progress. The second part of the question, therefore, does not arise.

Mr. STEWART: Can my hon. Friend indicate what is the obstacle to agreement, and whether any steps can be taken on this side, or by negotiations between the Governments, to get over that difficulty?

Mr. SKELTON: No, Sir, I should not like to answer that part of the question without notice.

Captain McEWEN: Can the hon. Member say whether he anticipates that any substantial order will be placed by the Soviet Government?.

Mr. SKELTON: It would, I feel, be a most unfortunate circumstance in the interests of the development of mutual trade between the two countries if the negotiations did not result in a substantial increase of trade.

Mr. WEST (for Mr. LEONARD): 59.
asked the Secretary of State for Scotland whether his attention has been drawn to the destitution existing in the Scottish fishing communities in consequence of the continued depression in the herring fishing industry; and whether it is proposed to take any ameliorative action?

Mr. SKELTON: My right hon. Friend fully appreciates the depression existing in the herring industry and the economic effects of that depression in the fishing communities concerned. On the general question as affecting the herring industry, I would refer to the statement which I made on Tuesday in reply to the hon. Member for Banffshire (Sir M. Wood). So far as the relief of individuals is concerned, I have no reason to suppose that the position is incapable of being dealt with by the normal methods of public assistance.

Mr. WEST: Has the hon. Gentleman received any representations from the town council of Buckie or from the county council of Banff?

Mr. SKELTON: Yes, Sir; telegrams have been received from various bodies, including the two mentioned by the hon. Gentleman, expressing alarm at the situation.

Mr. STEWART: In view of the sharp divergence of opinion as to the degree of the present depression, will the hon. Gentleman consider calling for an emergency report from the Sea Fish Commission as to the facts of the present situation, and base thereupon an immediate set of emergency proposals in order to overcome what we understand is the severe depression?

Mr. SKELTON: Without assuming the correctness of my hon. Friend's statement that there is a divergence of opinion as to the severity of the depression. I will consider his suggestion.

Oral Answers to Questions — TRANSPORT (PEDESTRIAN CROSSINGS).

Sir GIFFORD FOX: 47.
asked the Minister of Transport if any Regulations are to be made regulating the movements of pedestrians on the paths laid out across the streets in the Metropolitan area?

The PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the MINISTRY of TRANSPORT (Lieut.-Colonel Headlam): Yes, Sir, Regulations will be made to regulate the movements of pedestrians as well as those of drivers of vehicles at the crossing places.

Mr. H. WILLIAMS: Do these Regulations cover the city of London, in view of the high number of accidents to pedestrians?

Lieut. - Colonel HEADLAM: The Regulations will be the same for all the selected areas.

Oral Answers to Questions — ARMS TRAFFIC (BOLIVIA AND PARAGUAY).

Mr. MANDER: 56.
asked the President of the Board of Trade whether any application for licences to export arms to Bolivia and Paraguay, during the period of the present hostilities, have been refused?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: No, Sir.

Mr. MANDER: In view of the fact that on seven occasions during the last four years export licences for arms were refused on grounds of public policy, could they not be suitably refused in this case, in order to prevent the carrying on of this war? Would not this be a very suitable occasion on which to intervene on grounds of public policy?

Mr. MANDER: 73.
asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs on what occasions, in public or in private, proposals have been made by this or other countries at Geneva for a general embargo on exports of arms to countries at war, including Bolivia and Paraquay; and whether be will press publicly at the present meeting of the Council of the League for immediate action on these lines?

The SECRETARY of STATE for FOREIGN AFFAIRS (Sir John Simon): As regards the first part of this question, I would refer the hon. Member to the reply returned yesterday to my hon. Friend the Member for West Leeds (Mr. V. Adams), in regard to the question of an embargo on the export of arms to Bolivia and Paraguay, which are the only two countries now in state of war. As regards the second part, the answer is in the affirmative.

Mr. MANDER: Has the right hon. Gentleman any recent information as to the attitude of the United States Government upon this matter?

Sir J. SIMON: No, Sir, I have no information more recent than that which I have given to the House.

Mr. HANNON: Will the right hon. Gentleman say whether, in point of fact, any arms have been sent out to Bolivia and Paraguay during the progress of the war?

Sir J. SIMON: I believe that an answer was given by the President of the Board of Trade the other day which contained a table and which, so far as I could see, did show that very insignificant quantities, but still some quantities, had gone to Bolivia and Paraguay.

Major Sir ARCHIBALD SINCLAIR: Will the right hon. Gentleman give the House his assurance that the Government will use all their powers, and that he will use all his influence at Geneva, to stop this revolting traffic?

Sir J. SIMON: If the right hon. and gallant Gentleman will be good enough to look at the second part of the question on the Paper and the answer which I gave, he will see that the answer to his question is in the affirmative.

Mr. LEWIS JONES: Is it not a fact that the Lord Privy Seal only this morning has made a proposal at Geneva on behalf of the British Government for the acceptance of other nations for the prohibition of arms to Bolivia and Paraguay?

Sir J. SIMON: Yes, that is so.

Oral Answers to Questions — PUBLICATION (" SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE ").

Mr. H. WILLIAMS: 62.
asked the Attorney-General if his attention has been drawn to the account of an alleged conversation on State affairs beween His Majesty The King and the Prime Minister in a book entitled "Special Correspondence"; and what action he proposes to take to prevent the further publication of the alleged conversation?

The SOLICITOR - GENERAL (Sir Donald Somervell): My right hon. and learned Friend has read the passage to which I understand my hon. Friend
refers : the alleged conversation is the author's account of what he imagines took place. It is not proposed to take any action.

Mr. WILLIAMS: Does the hon. and learned Gentleman think it desirable that people should write books professing to know what happens between His Majesty and his advisers?

Oral Answers to Questions — NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SCOTLAND.

Sir SAMUEL CHAPMAN: 63.
asked the First Commissioner of Works if he can now make any further statement with reference to the proposed building for the National Library of Scotland?

The FIRST COMMISSIONER OF WORKS (Mr. Ormsby-Gore): After consideration of the recommendation of the Selection Committee appointed for the purpose, I have invited Mr. Reginald Fairlie to act as architect for the building, and I am glad to be able to say that Mr. Fairlie has intimated his acceptance.

Mr. GUY: May I ask whether the architect appointed will have under his consideration the question of the provision of temporary stackage pending the demolition of the existing sheriff court?

Mr. ORMSBY-GORE: I do not think so.

Oral Answers to Questions — COAL INDUSTRY.

CONSUMPTION (OIL DUTY).

Mr. MITCHESON: 65.
asked the Secretary for Mines if he can furnish an estimate of the increased consumption of coal in this country which has resulted from the imposition of a duty on fuel oil?

The SECRETARY for MINES (Mr. Ernest Brown): Official information is not available. But a short time ago I received a deputation from the Coal Utilisation Council and other bodies, which furnished detailed information, collected by various trade organisations. This showed that, in terms of coal, there had been conversions from oil to coal and coal products, and business retained which it was stated would, but for the tax, have been lost to home produced fuels, representing an annual rate of consumption of over 600,000 tons.

COMPENSATION FOR DAMAGE.

Mr. HALES: 66.
asked the Secretary for Mines whether, having regard to the damage done to property owing to mining operations in North Staffordshire and other parts of the country, he will consider the advisability of bringing in a Bill levying a small tax on each ton of coal raised to the surface to be used as a reserve fund for the compensation of property owners whose buildings have been damaged owing to mining operations?

Mr. E. BROWN: No, Sir. I cannot agree that this proposal offers a practical solution of the problem. My hon. Friend will find the difficulties of any such scheme dealt with in detail on pages 50–52 of the Final Report of the Royal Commission on Mining Subsidence, published in June, 1927.

Mr. HALES: Is my hon. Friend aware that the damage is of the most serious description, and, in view of the fact that it has affected four churches, two town halls, two markets, a museum, and an art school, causing damage to the amount of about £200,000, will the hon. Member discuss with we whether something cannot be done?

Mr. BROWN: I shall be very glad to discuss matters with the hon. Member, but I must warn him that it will be a very difficult and complicated discussion.

Mr. T. SMITH: Could not this tax-be levied on the royalty owners and not on the mine owners?

Oral Answers to Questions — AIR PASSENGER (TICKETS).

Lieut. Colonel Sir WALTER SMILES: 67.
asked the Under-Secretary of State for Air if he is aware that a Government subsidised air line is putting pressure on recognised travel agencies to restrict or prevent the sale of the tickets available by small unsubsidised air passenger-carrying companies; and whether he will make representations to the company concerned to put an end to this practice?

The UNDER-SECRETARY of STATE for AIR (Sir Philip Sassoon): I have no evidence that Imperial Airways, which is the only Government subsidised air company, is responsible for any representations which may have been made to travel
agencies on the lines described in my hon. and gallant Friend's question, the second part of which does not, therefore, arise.

Mr. WHITESIDE: Will the hon. Gentleman draw the attention of the railway companies to the fact that action in restricting the sale of tickets for air travel is hardly compatible with their alleged interest in air lines?

Sir P. SASSOON: No, Sir, I do not think I could do that.

Sir W. SMILES: Is the Under-Secretary aware of the great difficulty of buying tickets in London to travel by air to Belfast?

Sir P. SASSOON: As I said, no pressure has been brought to bear by Imperial Airways. Any pressure is a matter for the railways.

Oral Answers to Questions — BRITISH ARMY.

REMOUNTS (PURCHASES, NORTHERN IRELAND).

Sir G. FOX: 68.
asked the Financial Secretary to the War Office whether, with a view to assisting the Government in preventing the smuggling of dutiable animals from the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland, he will take steps to reverse his decision that it is not practicable to take any effective steps to ascertain the origin of remounts purchased in Northern Ireland, and instruct the War Office buyers not to purchase any further horses in Northern Ireland without obtaining full particulars of their origin?

The FINANCIAL SECRETARY to the WAR OFFICE (Mr. Duff Cooper): The course suggested is impracticable, and I regret that I am unable to reverse the decision already given.

Sir G. FOX: Is it not desirable that those figures should be obtained at the earliest possible opportunity, seeing that after the Finance Bill is on the Statute Book it will be obligatory to make these returns in certain circumstances?

Mr. COOPER: I do not see how it can be done.

Sir G. FOX: 69.
asked the Financial Secretary to the War Office what was
the cost during the past financial year of keeping in touch with the Irish Free State market for remounts; what was the number of those purchased in that market during the past financial year; whether that especially suitable remount of the light-draught type previously obtained in the Irish Free State market is now being obtained to any extent in Northern Ireland after importation from the Irish Free State; and, if so, whether, seeing that the expense of keeping in touch with the Irish Free State market itself can no longer be justified, he will consider a change of policy in this matter?

Mr. COOPER: I do not think that there was any extra cost, since the travelling expenses of purchasing officers arise in whatever district remounts are purchased. 168 remounts at an average cost of a little over £44 were purchased from the Irish Free State during the past financial year. I am not aware of the place of origin of remounts now bought in Northern Ireland and no change of policy is contemplated.

Oral Answers to Questions — BRAZIL (BRITISH INVESTORS).

Sir NICHOLAS GRATTAN-DOYLE: 70.
asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs if he will make inquiries from the Brazilian Government as to the prospect of facilities being granted for payment to British bondholders of interest on the City of Santos (Brazil) Seven per Cent. Consolidated Loan of 1927?

Sir J. SIMON: My hon. Friend will be aware that the recently issued scheme for the consolidation of the Federal, State and Municipal debts of Brazil placed the loan referred to by him in the 7th Grade. Under the scheme payment on 7th Grade loans is to be made during the first year of 17½ per cent. of the face value of the coupons due in connection with interest, a percentage which will increase to 20 per cent. and 22½ per cent. in the second and third years respectively, and to 32½ per cent. in the last of the four years covered by the scheme.

Sir N. GRATTAN-DOYLE: Is my right hon. Friend aware that the City of Santos has been in default since 1931, and, in view of the fact that there are a great number of British investors who are con-
cerned with this unsatisfactory position, will he take all possible steps to relieve the situation?

Sir J. SIMON: The scheme to which I have referred is a scheme which was designed by the Brazilian Government to divide equitably the exchange available over loans of different kinds, and, when the scheme as a whole is examined, I think it will be found that bondholders will, in the first year covered by the scheme, actually receive considerably more than they have received in the past, and still more in successive years; and, in view of the undoubtedly serious exchange transfer difficulties, I do not at this stage consider that the interests of British bondholders as a whole would be served by addressing representations to the Brazilian Government.

Oral Answers to Questions — EGYPT (MIXED COURTS).

Mr. RHYS DAVIES: 71 and 72.
asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (1) if he is aware of the dissatisfaction in Egypt as to the constitution of the mixed courts; and whether he will support the Egyptian claims for the use of Arabic, the native language of the country, on an equality with recognised European languages, and for the right of Egyptian Judges to preside over mixed courts by virtue of their seniority and without prejudice to their nationality;
(2) what is the attitude of His Majesty's Government towards the threat of the Egyptian Government to suspend the mixed courts after 12 months' notice to the Powers affected; and whether such notice has already been tendered?

Sir J. SIMON: His Majesty's Government have not up to the present received any proposals from the Egyptian Government for the modification either of the constitution or of the usage of the Mixed Courts. Still less are they aware of any threat to denounce the conventions under which these courts are constituted. I am, nevertheless, aware that several points connected with the organisation of these tribunals have recently attracted attention in Egypt; and while the hon. Member will not expect me to formulate the attitude of His Majesty's Government towards claims which have not as yet been put forward, I may say that in any further conversations which
His Majesty's High Commissioner may have with the Egyptian Government—some have already taken place—as well as in the consideration of any official proposals which the Egyptian Government may put forward, the following three points will be borne in mind :
(1) the technical and professional claim of the Egyptian Judges to equality with their foreign colleagues has already been recognised by the Mixed Courts themselves;
(2) while the use of Arabic in pleadings and the giving of evidence is, as I understand, already freely conceded, the suitability of that language for the rendering and recording of judgments which must not only be based upon French law but must be intelligible to all the Judges composing the Chamber seems at least open to doubt;
(3) the Mixed Courts are not the only set of courts existing in Egypt. There are other national courts which are purely Egyptian. The peculiar importance of the Mixed Courts is due to the fact that they were created at once to relieve Egypt of the much greater burden imposed upon her by the full consular jurisdiction which had previously existed and to safeguard the interests of the foreign communities. Both these objects will have to be kept in view in dealing with any proposals for modifications in their constitution and procedure.

Mr. DAVIES: May we take it that the negotiations on the points that have caused a great deal of dissatisfaction in Egypt are still going on, and that they are not yet cleared up?

Sir J. SIMON: As I have said; there have been conversations with the High Commissioner already, and I believe that they are still continuing.

Oral Answers to Questions — EX-NAVAL MEN (COLOMBIAN ENGAGEMENT).

Mr. MANDER: 74.
asked the First Lord of the Admiralty if in view of the terms of the Foreign Enlistment Act, he has any statement to make with reference to the circumstances in which a hundred ex-officers and ratings, of the British Navy left Tilbury on Saturday for Colombia to man two destroyers recently bought by the Colombian Government, having
signed on for two years; and if he has any information to show if these men are to take part in the hostilities between Colombia and Peru?

The FIRST LORD of the ADMIRALTY (Sir Bolton Eyres Monsell): The provisions of the Foreign Enlistment Act have no bearing on the engagement by the Colombian Government of certain ex-naval officers and ratings, as Colombia is not at war. The last part of the question, therefore, does not arise.

Mr. MANDER: Can the First Lord Bay whether these men are reservists?

Sir B. EYRES MONSELL: Yes, Sir, some of them are reservists, but none of them are on active service.

Mr. MANDER: Will the First Lord say whether he considers it decent that British subjects are to be sent out as mercenaries to serve in killing——

Sir B. EYRES MONSELL: These men are not sent out as mercenaries. They were applied for by the Colombian Government. The Admiralty have to give their permission. If I had withheld that permission, I should have been depriving a lot of men of work——

Mr. MANDER: Killing work——

Sir B. EYRES MONSELL: I should have been inviting the Colombian Government to get men from some other nation, which I think would have been a great disadvantage. If there were any question of mercenaries, I should come to the hon. Gentleman.

Mr. MANDER: In view of the fact that these men are going to be paid for by the Colombian Government, are they not rightly described in every sense as mercenaries?

At end of Questions :

Mr. MANDER: I beg to give notice that I shall at the earliest opportunity on the Motion for the Adjournment of the House call attention to the enlistment of British subjects in the Colombian Navy.

Oral Answers to Questions — BIRMINGHAM MEDICAL SCHOOL (VIVISECTION).

Mr. GROVES: 10.
asked the Home Secretary whether it is proposed to
register under the Cruelty to Animals Act, 1876, for the performance therein of experiments upon living animals, the new Birmingham medical school which is to be built as part of the hospital centre scheme?

The UNDER-SECRETARY of STATE for the HOME DEPARTMENT (Mr. Douglas Hacking): If the hon. Member's question relates to the new medical school buildings of the University of Birmingham which are being erected at Edgbaston, I am informed that the "University Medical and Scientific Departments, Edgbaston, Birmingham," are already registered for the performance therein of experiments on living animals. My right hon. Friend has not yet received any communication from the university authorities as to the inclusion of the new medical school buildings in the registered premises. When my right hon. Friend answered a question of the hon. Member on the 2nd instant, he assumed that the question related to the Birmingham General Hospital.

Oral Answers to Questions — PENTONVILLE PRISON.

Mr. McENTEE: 15.
asked the Home Secretary whether he is aware that in the negotiations for the sale of Pentonville Prison as a housing site the difficulty has been that the price demanded has been equivalent to reinstatement figures; and whether, in view of the great need of housing in that part of the Metropolis, the matter will be reconsidered?

Mr. HACKING: The possibility of disposing of the Pentonville Prison site for housing purposes has never reached the stage of formal negotiations involving questions of price. As my right hon. Friend explained in reply to a question by the hon. Member for Plaistow (Mr. Thorne) on 26th April, the outstanding difficulty is to find other accommodation for the prisoners now sent to Pentonville, and no satisfactory alternative has yet been found.

Oral Answers to Questions — GALLOWAY WATER POWER COMPANY (OVERTIME).

Mr. T. SMITH (for Mr. HICKS): 35.
asked the Financial Secretary to the Treasury if his attention has been drawn to the practice of the Galloway Water Power Company in permitting excessive overtime and Sunday work on their
contracts, notwithstanding protests by the Stewartfy County Council which contended that proper and sufficient relays of additional men should be engaged so as not to interfere with the gangs working on week-days; and whether he is prepared to make representations to the company in regard to this matter?

Mr. HORE-BELISHA: I have not received any representations on the matter to which the hon. Member refers, but I am making inquiries of the company and will communicate with him as soon as possible.

Oral Answers to Questions — GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS (POST OFFICE SAVINGS BANK).

Mr. JOHN WILMOT (for Mr. BANFIELD): 60.
asked the Postmaster-General the number of promotions made to the grade of staff officer in the Savings Bank Department since 1st January, 1921; the number of executive officers and higher clerical officers, respectively; and the number of each grade selected for promotion to staff officer rank since 1st January, 1921?

The POSTMASTER-GENERAL (Sir Kingsley Wood): As the answer to this question containa a number of figures, I will, with the hon. Member's permission, circulate it in the OFFICIAL REPORT.

Following is the answer :

During the period 1921 to 1925 the executive and higher clerical posts in the Savings Bank Department were bracketed, and individual officers were not definitely assigned to either grade. During this period 33 promotions were made to the grade of staff officer. On the division of the "bracketed posts" there were 227 executive and 28 higher clerical officers; the present figures are 126 and 89 respectively. During the latter period 47 executive officers and one higher clerical officer have been promoted to the grade of staff officer. Officers on both grades have been considered on their merits with due regard to seniority, but the higher clerical officers have in general been considerably junior to the officers selected.

Oral Answers to Questions — BROADCASTING.

Mr. BURNETT (for Mr. THOMAS COOK): 61.
asked the Postmaster-General if, in view of the fact that the recent broadcast
talks by workless people were both incomplete and misleading, he will use his powers under the charter to prevent talks on such subjects in future unless more satisfactory arrangements for censorship are made?

Mr. LAWSON: On a point of Order. May I draw your attention, Mr. Speaker, to the nature of this question? The question contains allegations concerning the statements of two workless people through the British Broadcasting Corporation on Saturday last. Those people have written to Members of this House stating that their statements are absolutely true. The British Broadcasting Corporation is, I understand, responsible for these statements. May I ask you if it is right that this question should be on the Order Paper, making these allegations against people who cannot be here in this House to answer for themselves?

Mr. SPEAKER: I think the responsibility for this rests on the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Sir K. WOOD: I will bring my hon. Friend's observations to the notice of the Governors of the British Broadcasting Corporation; but I desire to maintain the position of the Governors as set out in the Charter and the Licence of the Corporation, and in accordance with the terms of the resolution which was approved by a large majority of this House on the 22nd February, 1933.

Mr. BURNETT: In view of the highly conflicting nature of the statements which have been made about this case, is it not desirable in such cases that care should be taken to verify the facts beforehand?

Mr. LAWSON: May I ask the Postmaster-General whether, in answering for the British Broadcasting Corporation, he does not think it his duty to protect people who are willing to make these statements, and whose statements have been verified?

Sir K. WOOD: I must draw the hon. Member's attention to the charter and licence of the Corporation, in which the respective duties of myself and the-Corporation are defined.

Mr. LAWSON: Will the right hon. Gentleman ask supporters of the Government of which he is a Member not to
make charges against people who cannot defend themselves?

Oral Answers to Questions — CARNARVON (TOWN WALLS).

Mr. DAVID EVANS (for Mr. ALED ROBERTS): 64.
asked the First Commissioner of Works whether he has any announcement to make as to the handing over to his Department of parts of the town walls of Carnarvon?

Mr. ORMSBY-GORE: I am glad to have this opportunity of acknowledging the generosity of the owner of the greater part of the mediaeval town walls of Carnarvon, Sir Michael Duff Assheton Smith, who has presented them to the nation through my Department. As a result of this public-spirited action, the future preservation of these walls and towers is assured. These walls, which are a complete circuit round the mediaeval borough, when they have been exposed to view and carefully repaired, will form, together with the castle, one of the most impressive national monuments in the British Isles.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE.

Mr. ATTLEE: May I ask the Lord President of the Council what business will be taken during the first week when Parliament reassembles after the Recess?

Mr. BALDWIN: Tuesday, 29th May : Statutory Salaries (Restoration) (Money) Resolution, Committee stage; Cotton Manufacturing Industry (Temporary Provisions) (Money) Resolution, Report stage; Cotton Manufacturing Industry (Temporary Provisions) Bill, remaining stages; Palestine Loan (Guarantee) Bill, Second Reading; Land Settlement (Scotland) Bill, Third Reading.
Wednesday, 30th May : Supply, Committee (6th Allotted Day)—Board of Education Estimate.
Thursday, 31st May : Committee stage of the Milk (Money) Resolution and of the British Sugar (Subsidy) Bill.
The business for Friday, 1st June, will be announced later.
On any day, if there is time, other Orders may be taken.

BILLS REPORTED.

WEST GLOUCESTERSHIRE WATER BILL [Lords],

WATCHET URBAN DISTRICT COUNCIL BILL [Lords],

Reported, with Amendments; Reports to lie upon the Table, and to be printed.

MESSAGE FROM THE LORDS.

That they have passed a Bill, intituled, "An Act to authorise the Central Electricity Board to make certain arrangements with authorised undertakers who are the owners of generating stations which are not selected stations; to authorise the Central Electricity Board to supply electricity directly to railway companies for certain purposes; to amend sections eleven and twelve of the Electricity (Supply) Act, 1926; and for purposes connected with the matters aforesaid." [Electricity (Supply) Bill [Lords].]

And also, a Bill, intituled, "An Act to amend the law as to the effect of death in relation to causes of action and as to the awarding of interest in civil proceedings." [Law Reform (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill [Lords].]

Orders of the Day — COTTON MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY (TEMPORARY PROVISIONS) BILL.

Order for Second Reading read.

3.48 p.m.

The MINISTER OF LABOUR (Sir Henry Betterton): I beg to move, "That the Bill be now read a Second time."
The object of the Bill is set out in the Long Title, which reads as follows :
To make temporary provision for enabling statutory effect to be given to rates of wages agreed between representative organisations in the cotton manufacturing industry; and for purposes connected with the matter aforesaid.
I have prepared and brought in this Bill after very close consultation with the organisations concerned, both of employers and of employed, and I am fully entitled to say that in its broad principles it is an agreed Bill in the sense that both parties accept, and indeed, ask for the acceptance of the principles which it enshrines. Before I deal shortly with the Bill itself, I want to say that it does not in any way at all supersede collective bargaining, nor does it impose State determination of working conditions. [It does not interfere at all with the freedom of action of the organisations of employers and employed. It is nothing more than an attempt on the part of Parliament to assist the industry it-self to establish order within the industry.] As I said a moment ago, the request for this Measure came from the industry itself.
It may well be asked why it is that cotton, of all industries, was the industry which made this request. The cotton industry is a very well-organised industry. Cotton was one of the first industries to settle its differences and disputes by conciliation or arbitration. So we may ask : why is it that this industry of all others should come to the Minister of Labour and the Minister of Labour should then come to the House with these proposals? The reason is a very simple one. [In this branch of this industry the system of collective agreements is in the process of disintegration and a state of chaos is threatened which would be disastrous to the industry
and indeed to the country.] I Cotton has had to face competition of a very severe character during the past few years and there has been at the same time a great contraction of world trade. The production of cloth is just about a third of what it was before the War. At the present time, therefore, the productive capacity of the plant is very much in excess of the demand. The result of this has been a reckless scramble for business, and the industry has become involved in internal dissention just at a time when the pooling of the combined resources of technique and finance was most essential. No one regrets more than the organisations concerned that the proposals that I am making are necessary. The organisations which represent the great majority of employers are prepared and are desirous of adhering to the agreements that are reached. Of that there is no question at all. But they are powerless to enforce agreements upon a recalcitrant minority and, in the absence of such powers as the Bill proposes to give them, they see no hope of a solution of their difficulties. What is true of the employers' organisations is equally true of the workers' organisations. The organisations have always represented a very large proportion of those engaged in the industry and the unions have themselves faithfully observed the agreements which have been entered into, but economic pressure due to unemployment has imposed too great a strain upon the loyalty of individual members, many of whom cannot withstand the offer of employment at a lower wage than that provided in the agreements.
So it will be observed that the question is not one of fixing wages at a higher or lower level or at any particular level. The question before the industry now is how to secure that the whole principle of collective bargaining does not break down. The great majority of the employers are anxious to honour agreements. The payment of lower wages where that has taken place, I am advised, has not resulted in the sale of a single extra yard of cloth anywhere. It merely means that employers who are faithful to the agreements, and who wish to keep them, find themselves unable to compete with those employers who either have not been parties to the agreements or, if they have, have broken away from them. The position of the employer who wishes to
keep agreements is therefore hopelessly prejudiced if he is to be subjected all the time to this undercutting or what in a different connection is often called black-legging.
I speak now with some little experience of these matters and I am certain that there is nothing more likely to cause dissatisfaction or unrest in any industry than a feeling of economic insecurity and a lack of stability in wages and working conditions. That is just as true of cotton as of any other industry. The result in the cotton industry has been that the adjustment in the working conditions of the industry has become more and more difficult, and, for that reason, the industry cannot settle down to make a new agreement though they all recognise that such an agreement is necessary. Both sides pressed the point closely upon me that they cannot settle down even to consider new agreements with regard to rates of wages unless they are satisfied that they will be carried out. The present position is not merely a discouragement to both sides of the industry who desire to get down to business; it is really impossible to expect them to begin to consider these essential matters unless they feel that an agreement with regard to rates of wages will be an anchor upon which they can ride and which will give them security.
There have been in recent years some most disastrous stoppages in the cotton industry. In the prolonged and serious dispute of two years ago, in the settlement of which my Department took an active and I think a useful part, special attention was devoted to the question of honouring agreements, and the organisations on both sides agreed as to the urgent necessity of discovering means whereby conditions agreed upon by the responsible organisations could be made operative. Shortly afterwards I caused a special investigation to be made into the wage position principally in those mills where the more looms system was in operation. In this matter I had the co-operation of both sides, and the report that was made gave, I believe, a basis of facts which was of very great assistance in indicating the real position. I think that the help that we were able to give them was fully appreciated by both sides of the industry.
One hoped that that would really have been the end of the difficulty so far as this wage question is concerned, but a long time, certainly over a year, has elapsed since then, and the organisations have come to realise that without the temporary assistance of the Government they cannot hope to deal effectively with the situation. There is no lack of confidence on either side that they will be able to reach agreements upon wages and working conditions. There is, however, lack of confidence as to whether, having reached agreements, those agreements will be faithfully carried out, and that there will not be in the industry those who will undercut, and therefore render nugatory the agreements which have been reached.
That is the position which was put to me by the leaders of both organisations very much in the way in which I have endeavoured to put it before the House. I did what I think I was bound to do in the circumstances. Having heard what they had to say, I made independent inquiries on my own account, and I took what advice I could. All my information and all my inquiries confirmed to the full what the organisations themselves had put to me, and I am satisfied that the case they put reflected quite truly the position in the industry. I will ask the House to consider what was my position. It was put to me that unless something was done, and done quickly, we should be face to face with chaos in the industry, with disastrous consequences upon the industry and the whole of the North of England.
The first thing I considered was whether it would not be possible to do what both sides desired, namely, to get some security for these rates of wages, through the medium of legislation already on the Statute Book with which we are all familiar, namely, the Trade Boards Acts. I did very carefully consider whether the application of the Trade Boards Acts to this industry was not the proper way to deal with it; but I came to the conclusion that the Trade Boards Acts could not be used. Without expressing a view one way or the other, I put the proposal to the representatives of the organisations who came jointly to see me for the third or fourth time. They gave me the answer which
I thought they would give, and it was the conclusion to which I had come, namely, that the Trade Boards Acts were not intended for cases of this sort at all; they were intended originally for sweated trades, and later they were extended to cover trades in which there was inadequate organisation. Neither of those conditions is applicable to this industry, and I agreed with the organisations when they told me that they did not desire the application of the Trade Boards Acts. After considering all the facts that were brought to my notice, and which I have put before the House, I came to the conclusion that a Bill should be brought in upon the lines of the Bill which I am now submitting to the House, and the organisations are quite satisfied with the basis upon which I have proceeded.
I will now explain quite shortly, exactly what the Bill does. The scope of it, as the Title indicates, is confined to manufacturing, that is to say, the weaving side of the cotton industry, and it does not cover the spinning or finishing branches which are entirely different. The definition of the industry and the areas to which the Bill will apply—the areas will be found in the Schedule—have been agreed with the industry itself after a very careful survey, in which, I may say, I have been greatly assisted by the factory inspectors of the Home Office, through the kindness of my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary. The Bill is scrupulous to avoid the inclusion of work regarded as covered by other textile industries such as the wool textile industry. The Bill leaves the industry's own voluntary machinery entirely free and—I attach great importance to this point—there is no provision at all in the Bill which has any connection with compulsory arbitration, because whatever may be said for or against compulsory arbitration, I am quite certain that at the present time industry as a whole would resent it, and would not have it. If you tried compulsory arbitration, I think it would fail in its object and far more harm than good would be done by attempting to apply it in such cases.
Therefore, I can assure the House that there is no connection whatever between the principle of compulsory arbitration and this Bill. Neither the Government nor any independent party is given any power to fix rates of wages, or to inter-
fere in any way with the voluntary negotiation of wages and working conditions. I attach great importance to that, and so do the industry. That is a matter for them, and not for me or for this House, and in this Bill we are careful to secure that we do not in any way interfere with the great principle of voluntary negotiation with regard to wages and working conditions. The voluntary system, therefore, continues just as before. Further, we have made provision to ensure that no interest is unfairly treated before the force of law is imposed upon those who are not members of organisations.
I will go through the Clauses very shortly. Under Clause 1, where an agreement has actually been made, an application for an Order may be made jointly by organisations representing the majority of employers in the industry and organisations representing the majority of operatives of the class affected by the proposed rates. The organisations themselves, and not the Minister of Labour, will determine the scope of the Order and the rates of wages to be included in it. Unless the Minister is satisfied prima facie that the applicant organisations do not respectively represent majorities of employers and operatives, he must appoint a board to report upon the application. The board will consist of a chairman and two other members not connected with the industry. The parties who have made the application are required under Clause 1 (2) to give notice of their application in the prescribed manner, and to make available, to anybody interested, copies of the agreed rates which are the subject of the application. A period will be allowed during which any objections to the making of an Order may be sent to the Minister. This will provide an opportunity for all circumstances to be brought under review and any objections by minorities to be considered. The board will then consider the application with not more than six representatives from each side acting as assessors. This arrangement will ensure that the board has any technical assistance they may require.
With regard to the duties of the board, under Clause 1 the board will satisfy themselves that the organisations represent majorities. If satisfied on this they
must report to the Minister on the desirability of making an Order to bring into effect the provisions of the agreement relating to wages. The board cannot make a recommendation in favour of an Order unless all three members are unanimous. The board will have no power to make any changes in the agreement which is submitted to them. The House will observe throughout the Clauses of the Bill how careful we have been to secure the principle of voluntary agreement between the organisations themselves. We do not attempt to impose upon them from outside something which they do not want. Under Clause 2 it will be for the Minister to decide on all the facts before him, including the report of the board, and of any representations made to him whether or not he should make an Order. In this matter his position is again very much the same as that under the Trade Boards Acts. Briefly, the effect of an Order is to extend the wages agreement to employers who are not members of their appropriate organisations. There are three points to be noted in Clause 3: First, the Order will make it a term of the contract between the employer and an employed person of the class affected that his wages shall be at a rate not lower than the rate prescribed in the Order. Of course, that is fundamental.

Mr. ALEXANDER RAMSAY: I am sure the right hon. Gentleman would like the House to be clear on this point. When he speaks of wages, does he mean that time-rate wages are the basic rate, or does he mean piece-rate wages?

Sir H. BETTERTON: Clearly those are all questions for the industry itself. All that I consider doing is that when they have settled this point and any other similar points, and have incorporated these in wages agreements, then the Act may come into operation; but all these points are points for the industry itself, and I should not attempt to impose any views I may have upon either side.
Then the Bill provides that the employer will be subject to a penalty not exceeding £10 on summary conviction if wages are paid at less than the prescribed rate. Employers affected will be required to exhibit in their premises a notice setting out the rates of wages payable under the Order and to keep re-
cords of the wages actually paid, with a penalty if these requirements are not fulfilled. The Bill contains no provision for Government inspection; the whole object is to help the organisations to help themselves, and Government action throughout is kept to a minimum. The enforcement of an Order is left to those in the industry itself.
There is only one other thing that I need mention, and that is as to the duration of the Measure. The Bill itself is experimental, and therefore it is necessary that it should be temporary. Consequently, it is to remain in operation for three years, but it provides that if either side gives three months' notice to terminate an Order, then that Order comes to an end. The object, of course, again, is not to attempt anything like compulsion, but to leave the industry to carry out its agreements, and to continue or bring to an end an Order as it thinks fit. The Minister, however, may take steps himself to revoke an Order, if he has reason to believe that it is causing hardship to some part of the trade, or in the event of grave national emergency. Those, I think, are all the points of substance in this Bill, which is quite a short one.
Since the Bill has been printed, I have been both gratified and surprised by the evidence of approval with which it has been received. I would like to read a letter which, I think, is very significant and very characteristic of opinion which I have had from other sources. Obviously, I cannot give the name of the writer or indicate the part of Lancashire from which the letter came, but I can assure the House that the firm referred to here is one of very considerable consequence. The letter is dated 10th May, and I first saw it either yesterday or the day before. It says :
I am employed by one of the oldest established cotton manufacturing concerns in the county—as manager. My firm has never associated with any organisations but honours all agreements come to by such Associations with the Trade Unions. Due to our loyalty to these agreements, in recent years, we find ourselves unable to compete with firms, many of which were instrumental in making these agreements and who have since dishonoured them and paid wages at rates which have no bearing whatever on the agreed rates.
My firm look to the above Bill to put us on an equal footing with the rest of the trade, but our losses of late have been so
serious that my employers are not willing to continue them indefinitely, in fact they require a definite time-limit for consideration as to whether they will wait for the above legislation or close down. The latter course means the loss of my employment.
If you can give me some hope of an early order bringing the wage-cutters and price-cutters to heel, I have no doubt my employers would be willing to continue the struggle to compete instead of closing down in disgust and /or despair.
That is a concrete instance of what I am sure has for some time been going on all over Lancashire. The object of this Bill as I have said is not to diminish but to strengthen the system of collective bargaining which has been built up, and which I think first made progress in this particular industry or, at any rate, certainly in the textile industry of Lancashire. The Bill seeks to establish order where there is now every prospect of imminent chaos and anarchy and the destruction of the very basis upon which the peace and therefore the prosperity of the industry depends. For these reasons, I have no hesitation at all in commending the Bill to the House, and I hope that it will not only be accepted by the House, but that it will be passed into law with the least possible delay. I am certain that, if there is either prolonged delay or if the proposal is turned down, we may be faced with chaos in the industry.

4.18 p.m.

Mr. ARTHUR GREENWOOD: I find myself in the very embarrassing position, and it is no doubt also embarrassing to the right hon. Gentleman, of having to sing the same tune. I believe that this is the first occasion that that has ever happened in this Parliament. It is true that I may not sing in so high a key or with so loud a voice, but I hope that I shall sing in harmony in the lay which he has just delivered to the House. Those of us who are acquainted with the Lancashire textile industry know that for the last 12 years at least it has been crippled by adversity. I should have liked to have seen the right hon. Gentleman or one of his colleagues produce a Measure to deal with the root economic problems of the cotton industry. This Bill does not do that. It is concerned with the results of 12 years of serious economic difficulty in Lancashire.
It is easy to see what has happened. I remember that before the War there was no better organised industry in the country, either on the employers' side or
on the workers' side, than the cotton industry. It was one of the first industries to feel the full shock of the economic depression about 1920 or 1921. What has happened since has happened in other industries, but perhaps—and I think that the Minister will agree with me—in no industry more seriously than in the Lancashire textile trade. There have been defections from employers' organisations, and defections from trade unions. Men out of work and anxious to get work are prepared in very desperate economic circumstances—I think that they are wrong and that it is short-sighted—even to take jobs which they know cut at the roots of existing agreements. They are men whom we describe in Lancashire by the most obnoxious term in the working-class vocabulary as "blacklegs." They are men who are prepared to work on terms less favourable than their fellows are obtaining. I am not blaming them in those circumstances. It is due to the position in which they are placed. Precisely the same kind of thing has happened with employers, who normally, whether members of the trade organisations or not, would have honoured agreements, and that was a common thing before the War in Lancashire. They found themselves because of shrinking trade driven to every kind of expedient. Unfortunately, some of them adopted the easiest way of trying to depress wage rates. They are "blacklegs" among the employers.
The problem has therefore become a dual problem—a problem both to the employers in the industry and to the workers in the industry. It was a very unfortunate situation, but it was one that obviously had to be dealt with, because the fact that certain men obtained orders by sweating workpeople did not mean a new addition to the trade of this country. It meant a transfer of trade from an honourable employer to a dishonourable employer. There was no economic gain. There was a certain moral loss. That is the case which the employers themselves feel, and they are strongly of the opinion—and I have discussed the matter with them myself—that there ought, in circumstances such as those under which they are suffering now, to be some protection for the good employers and for the men with the team spirit and their employers who are prepared to play the game by their fellows, against the bad employer
who is not prepared to act as he should do. That is their case.
There is the case in which I am particularly interested, that of the workers in the cotton industry. They have suffered now for a dozen years and more from very serious unemployment. They have suffered very exceptionally, and in a way no other workers have suffered, from the fact that they may have worked for a 48-hour week and received at the end of it the wages of half a week, because, instead of working their four looms, they have only been working two. They have felt that some steps ought to be taken to stop this degradation of the standard of life of the people by the undercutting of wage rates and wage standards not called for by the economic circumstances of the industry, because the majority of the employers are prepared to continue to pay them. They appeal to be protected from this undercutting of wage rates because of a minority of employers acting against the decisions of the majority.
We have had to deal with this problem in Parliament before. It was because of the sweating employer that we had to introduce our Trade Boards legislation. It was because of the fact that in our highly complex industrial system we still had trades which were badly organised both on the side of the employers and on the side of the workers that our conception of the Trade Boards had to be extended, but the purpose of it was to secure a uniformity of working conditions and wages universally applied and operative in regard to everybody in the industry. I think that that policy is sound and that wages ought to be taken out of the competitive sphere altogether. An employer's orders ought not to depend on the lowness of the wages that he pays, but on the efficiency of the firm. The Trade Boards have tried to do that. This Bill is a new departure, and is of a kind which is different from any industrial Bill that we have ever placed on the Statute Book. It is a Bill which has been called for by the exceptional circumstances of the times.
I scrutinised the Bill very carefully. I do not like the Bills of the right hon. Gentleman as a rule. I was afraid that there might be provisions in it to which we should have to object, but I am bound, after what I have said about his Unem
ployment Bill, to admit that this is the most workmanlike piece of work for which he has been responsible. It is a well-drafted Bill and a much more carefully conceived Measure than the Measure which left him for another place only three days ago. First of all, there is no intention to supersede collective bargaining. I cannot imagine the organisations with which he has been dealing ever agreeing with a Bill that undermined, or in any way tried to undermine, that principle. It does not interfere in any way with the freedom of trade unionists and employers' associations to arrive at any agreements they like in the way they like and on the terms they like. It is an attempt—and one to be welcomed—to try and save collective bargaining from complete collapse in one of the most highly organised industries in the country. I regard that fact as important. I cannot conceive how our modern industrial system can go back to any kind of system of individual bargaining. I would like to see, without any compulsion, every workman in his trade union, and every employer in his appropriate organisation—both sides organised 100 per cent. strong. We cannot go back on organisations; we must rather go forward. This Bill is based on enforcing the considered decisions of majorities on what the Minister called recalcitrant minorities. To that no reasonable person can take exception.
The Minister pointed out also that there was no hidden motive in the Bill which might involve compulsory arbitration. It is because there is no interference with collective bargaining, because the Bill is to try and strengthen the hands of those engaged in collective bargaining, because there is no hidden hand of compulsory arbitration that we are prepared to support it. If I could find a single word in the Bill which looked like a limitation of the rights and freedom of the trade unions I would ask my hon. Friends to go into the Lobby against it. If I thought there was any suspicion of compulsory arbitration in the Bill, I should feel it my duty to vote against it. I am satisfied that there are no sinister intentions in the Bill. That is the highest compliment that I have ever paid the right hon. Gentleman.
There are certain hon. Members, not distinguished for their connection with
Lancashire or the textile industry, who feel themselves called upon to move the rejection of the Bill. I have not had one word of consultation with any Lancashire Member—I am no longer a Lancashire Member and, therefore, I speak with an independence which they cannot——

Mr. LEVY: What about Yorkshire?

Mr. GREENWOOD: I am a Yorkshire Member, and I will include Yorkshire in what I say. There will be no Lancashire Member and no West Riding Member who would dare to vote against this Bill.

Mr. LEVY: Hear, hear!

Mr. GREENWOOD: I would ask hon. Members whose varied professional experience is far removed from the textile industry to think twice before they take the step of opposing a Bill which has the unanimous support of all the trade organisations concerned, both employers and workers. This Bill is a result of their appeal to the Minister to try and help them out of their difficulty. Therefore, I ask hon. Members to think twice before they obstruct the progress of the Bill. My last word is to re-echo what the right hon. Gentleman said. I hope the Bill will have a speedy passage to the Statute Book and that it will carry with it the support of all Members of the House of Commons, whatever their party may be.

4.34 p.m.

Mr. MANDER: I think the Minister of Labour has made out an unanswerable case for the Bill, and I heartily congratulate him on having brought it in, more so because on the various occasions when I have endeavoured to get the same principles carried through in a Bill dealing with industrial councils generally he has shown a very great lack of sympathy and, indeed, has rather thrown cold water on my endeavours in that direction. Although there are a large number of trades in this country who are just as anxious as the cotton trade to have machinery of this kind in operation, making for the first time voluntary agreements come to between organisations of employers and workmen, compulsory, and giving them statutory authority, one is forced to ask the question why it is with all the difficulty that has been experienced in the past my right hon. Friend has at last given way, as it is
obvious he would have to do when faced with a trade of this kind. Surely it is because he is now dealing with one of the most important trades in the country and one of the most highly organised trades. When they come and ask for machinery of this kind it is politically impossible for the Minister to refuse to see to their wishes, whereas when other trades have come to him in the past, much smaller in size, he has felt able to neglect the appeal that has been made to him.
No doubt one of the arguments that will be used against the Bill is that it is undesirable that a majority should coerce a minority. The argument really is exactly in the opposite direction. The point is that the employers and the employed by a vast majority have agreed and desire that certain things should be done and they are being obstructed and held up by a small minority. It is the minority that is forcing its will upon the majority and the object of the Bill is to free the majority from the tyranny which is now exercised by an obscurantist number of black-leg employers. I think that is the answer in any case, even if there was anything in that argument. Surely in these days when we have marketing boards and other bodies where the majority is given, quite rightly, compulsory powers to override the minority, an argument of the kind to which I have referred cannot be brought forward.
There is one criticism of a general kind that I would make of the Bill, and that is its extreme timidity. My right hon. Friend having been forced to bring in a Bill of this kind has done it in the most tentative and experimental way that he possibly could. At the same time he has set a precedent, and there can be no going back upon it. I believe the precedent will be used and that gradually, and I hope rapidly, this legislation will be extended to many other industries which are as keen as the cotton industry to have powers of this kind. It is a fact that 20 or 30 industries organised in joint industrial councils have since the War, at one time or another, asked for powers of this kind. I rejoice that a breach has been made at last in the wall of obstruction. A' precedent has been set which is bound to be followed as the success of this experiment is seen, because I believe that it will be a very successful experiment.
When I speak of other industries asking for this kind of power I might perhaps be allowed to mention one in my own constituency, where the whole of the lock trade of this country is concentrated. The joint industrial council of the lock, latch and key industry have for years been asking for these powers because of exactly the same kind of difficulties that have been experienced in Lancashire. Certain employers, limited in number, undercut the agreed rates and thereby do a serious injustice to their more honourable competitors, and in that industry their case, although it is a small one, is just as unanswerable as that of the cotton industry. I believe that this Bill brings their day of success appreciably nearer. I agree with what my right hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mr. Greenwood) said, that this Bill does not interfere in any way with collective bargaining. I should oppose it if it did. It is a complementary Measure to collective bargaining. It says that collective bargaining shall operate effectively. I should like to see the time when every workman is voluntarily a member of his trade union and every employer voluntarily a member of his trade association.
If I might deal with certain criticisms of the Measure, which no doubt will receive consideration when it is going through Committee, I would say, in the first place, that it is a temporary Measure. Perhaps that is not of very great importance, because if it is a success, as I am sure it will be, I presume it can be carried on in the Expiring Laws Continuance Act for many years to come. I think, however, that the Minister might have been more optimistic and might have made the Measure a permanent one. Then there is the question of area, the definition of the industry by limiting its area. I am not sure that there are no considerable dangers arising from that provision. There is the possibility that a particular employer desiring to get outside the restrictions of the Measure might rent some factory or even erect one just outside the area referred to in the Bill. It would be necessary in that case to bring in an amending Measure in order to extend the provisions and to prevent such a person getting round the provisions of the Act. I wish the Minister would consider the possibility of dealing with the matter by definition of the industry itself,
which I cannot help thinking would be a much better way and certainly a practical proposition. If that were done the matter would have to be considered whether to include the weaving of artificial silk and of silk and cotton mixtures. These are points which, no doubt, will receive consideration in due course, and I am certain that they have been before the Minister.
The next point is, that I think it is a pity that the Bill is confined solely to the question of wages, and that it would have been better if it had been made to apply to all those conditions which are usually negotiated between employers and employed in Lancashire, such as the general conditions of work, hours, holidays and other things of that kind. I do not know what matters are dealt with by negotiation in Lancashire but whatever they are they ought all to come in. I would also mention one point which does require to be dealt with in order to prevent evasion. I understand that it is the practice in certain cotton factories in Lancashire now to make it a condition of employment that a worker shall allow a certain sum to be deducted from his wages weekly for the purchase of shares in the particular company where he works. That is a method of evasion and I hope that something will be put into the Bill to prevent getting round the Measure in that respect.
I cannot help thinking that the board itself is an unnecessary institution. The Minister has to satisfy himself that the demand is made by a majority of employers and employed in the industry, and one would have thought that that was sufficient. They ask for it and one would have thought that that would be enough. In any case, I should have thought that the board, having been appointed, had no need to act unanimously and that all the duties they would be called upon to perform would be to verify the facts and see whether it was really a majority of the employers and the employed who were asking for it, and not to go into the question of the expediency of it, and so forth. The board does not, however, interfere with the effective working of the Measure, but it is an additional safeguard. It is a further protection which can be included without really doing much harm to the efficiency of the Measure. There is also a point in Clause 3 to which I would draw attention, and I hope the
right hon. Gentleman will deal with it. There is to be a fine of £10. Does that mean that there is only to be a fine of £10 for all the offences committed by any one employer or does it mean that £10 is the penalty for each offence? I presume that it is the latter. Certainly it ought to be the latter, because if £10 is going to be the penalty to cover everything that is done it will be no use at all. There are cases where at the present time reductions amounting to £30 or £100 a week below the proper rates are taking place. We want, therefore, the penalty to apply to every single worker and to every occasion when an improper payment is made to him.
I have referred to several points which do not interfere with the admirable nature of the Measure. We on these benches shall give it every support and hope that it will get through at the earliest possible moment. Its objects are sound. They are to protect the good employer, to prevent his exploitation by the blackleg, the disloyal employer, whose operations are harmful to masters and men. The valuable precedent which is created will in the course of time have far-reaching and beneficent consequences in the legislative and industrial life of the country.

4.46 p.m.

Mr. HERBERT WILLIAMS: I beg to move, to leave out the word "now," and at the end of the Question, to add "upon this day six months."
I listened, as I always do, with the greatest care to the Minister of Labour in presenting the Bill in the admirable way in which he always presents a measure, but on this occasion I am sorry to say that he is presenting one of the worst Bills brought before this House in modern times. I say so with the greater regret because of the profound respect and admiration I have for the way he has handled another Bill for so many weeks, which is now on its way to the Statute Book. So far we have had a trio entertaining the House, singing in harmony except for a few sharps and flats by the last performer. A great statesman once warned us that if the two Front benches were in agreement it was invariably true that the measure was a bad one. On this occasion we have two and a-half Front benches in agreement, and that arouses my suspicions even more. The
Minister has said that collective bargaining is collapsing and that chaos will follow. That may be true; and it may not be true.
The Lancashire cotton industry has been organised in the sense we are now discussing for a longer period than any other industry, indeed, it has organised itself apparently into destruction. Organisation which, after the trade collapse in 1921, devises a system of short time working and an arrangement whereby endless firms which should have been cut out have been kept alive, does not commend itself to me, and if you push the matter a little further and consider those industries which are not organised you will find that they are industries in which employment is growing most rapidly. If only you have an industry properly organised you can ruin it for certain within a limited period of time. The vast decline of employment in coal mines, on the railways and in the cotton trade, does not make us believe that organisation is necessarily a good thing for an industry.
But the Bill does not apply to the people most concerned. There is a Schedule to the Bill, but pending a commercial agreement with Japan there is no provision that it shall apply to the parties in that country. The Bill should bring in the real serious competitors, the real blacklegs and scabs, to use the right hon. Member's attractive phrase. I agree that so far as the Bill is a bad one it has been carefully drafted as regards safeguards. The Minister of Labour quoted an anonymous manufacturer; later on I propose to quote a manufacturer who does not desire to be anonymous because he has written a letter to a number of hon. Members. The right hon. Member for Wakefield (Mr. Greenwood) commented on the fact that the six hon. Members who have bad the temerity to table a Motion for the rejection of the Bill, not a pleasant task, do not come from cotton constituencies. That is true, but we are not primarily concerned with the fact that the Bill relates to the cotton industry, we are concerned because the Bill contains a principle which is being put forward for the first time by the Government in this House and, therefore, issues of great importance are involved.
It is a Bill which people from other constituencies ought to support. If it becomes law there is a good chance that an honest employer might establish his
cotton mills in a new constituency, adopt new methods and obtain a higher degree of prosperity. Instead of being so economically conservative as the Lancashire manufacturers and trade unions seem to be, they might adopt entirely new methods and save themselves from destruction. There are some people who favour centralised control of industry. During the last two or three years of his life, I was closely associated with the late Lord Melchett, who was regarded as the arch rationaliser, and I was struck by what he wrote on the allied subject of import boards. This is what he said :
For instance, if a board makes up its mind that wheat is going to rise in price and purchases the entire requirements of a country on this basis, while events prove that world markets, instead of rising, fall, the error of judgment is transferred on a huge scale and involves enormous sums. With the present practice, where there are many individual buyers, some will take one view and some the opposite; whichever is right or wrong, some kind of average result which is not so far from the actual truth will be arrived at, and therefore the amount of error in either direction will never become of an extravagant nature. The risks of higher prices to the consumer or heavy loss to the taxpayer are outstanding and ever present weaknesses of schemes of bulk purchase.
It is true that that only applies to bulk purchases, but it, nevertheless, applies to the principle underlying this Bill, which is to take away from large numbers of people, employers and workmen, any right to determine the conditions under which they shall enter into contracts. The Bill proposes that A, B and C can enter into a contract which shall be enforceable against D and E, who are not parties to the contract or to the negotiations. That is a new principle, it is a bad principle, and I think it ought to be challenged. The hon. Member for East Wolverhampton (Mr. Mander) has stated the real situation; he made no bones about it. He regards the principle as good, and his regret is that it is not going to be extended. He says that it is to override an obscurantist minority. I shall look forward to his next speech on foreign affairs dealing with minorities in certain countries. It is a new doctrine of Liberalism that you should pass Acts of Parliament to override obscurantist minorities.

Mr. MANDER: This is an obscurantist minority holding up the vast majority.

Mr. WILLIAMS: Equally a small minority in certain countries are holding up the wishes of the vast majority. In the Bill you are taking from an obscurantist minority rights which they have always possessed in the past, and therefore I say it is a new doctrine.

Mr. COVE: Good old laissez faire.

Mr. WILLIAMS: I have never held the doctrine of laissez faire. I think that every principle should be applied with due sense and moderation. It has been said that what Lancashire thinks to-day the rest of the country will think tomorrow. Five years ago, when I was a guest at one of their organisations, I suggested that the sooner they abandoned that doctrine the better for the good health of Lancashire. Now they are introducing a completely new doctrine, different to anything they have believed in the past. I do not like quotations because I think that a man's own words are much better than the words of someone else, but I have an interesting quotation which I should like to read. It is this :
But there is another danger of which we should be warned in good time, and thereby avoid its main consequences. We should be very cautious about making too many arrangements which are in the nature of rings.
This is a definite ring. [HON. MEMBERS. "No!"] Anybody who comes under the provisions of the Bill will sell a certain commodity at a fixed price. If that is not a ring I do not know what a ring is.

Mr. CROSSLEY: There is a vast variety of materials.

Mr. WILLIAMS: But none the less it is a ring :
Rings in the old days bore within them the seeds of their own demise. We all know the very simple story of the Tings from which someone broke away. Some one trades at a lower price, but still at a profit. He does it once or twice, and in a very short time he is followed by others, and so the ring crumples up. So by natural evolution, like a chapter of natural history, the rings were saved from doing harm.
That is not an inadequate description of the Bill.

Mr. RHYS DAVIES: Does the hon. Member suggest that a girl leaving school at the age of 14 and entering a cotton mill in Lancashire should be entitled,
without any protection from a trade union, to enter into negotiations as regards her wages with her employer?

Mr. WILLIAMS: I am not saying anything of the kind, I am dealing with the Bill, which is based on the assumption that trade unions are not competent to do the job :
Let us be quite sure that, in granting to our industries enabling Bills which are to compel everybody in the industry to work to fixed prices without internal competition, and, of course, naturally at the expense of the consumer, we are not actually doing harm when we are intending to do good. After all, the break away of men from rings in pre-War times was one of the safeguards on which the consumer could rely. I fear that there are some who are engaged, and very rightly engaged, in the reorganisation of our industries who would like to get rid of that safeguard as far as it is in the public interest. That phrase, 'as far as it is in the public interest,' ought to be interpreted in its widest form. The truth is that we have rather in these days under-estimated the value of competition, forgetting the fact that it was by competition that we begat many new industries. It was under pressure of competition that we employed more and more machinery in our works and factories, and that we improved the design and equipment of our ships. It was competition, and still is competition, that turns depression to good account. In the struggle for profits we naturally bring about a reduction in costs.
These results have brought untold benefits to our people as a whole. Without competition there would have been no cheap silk stockings or small-powered motor cars. It is in the preservation of competition, acting under its main stimulus, that we can not only preserve the prospecity of our great industrial and commercial organisations, but can confer further blessings upon the democracy over which we rule." That is rather an interesting quotation, and no one will say that it does not apply to the principle of this Bill. It is critical of the principle of the Bill.

HON. MEMBERS: Author.

Mr. WILLIAMS: The President of the Board of Trade, speaking at the annual dinner of the British Bankers' Association on the 9th of this month. I wish my right hon. Friend the President was here, because it fits so admirably the case against this Bill in principle.

Mr. CAPORN: Was it not a speech in favour of Tree Trade?

Mr. MANDER: He is not a free trader.

Mr. WILLIAMS: It is not my business to explain the economic views of any right hon. Friend, for whom I have a profound regard and admiration, because I see two of his Cabinet colleagues and four other members of the Government, all of whom are satisfied that he is a sound protectionist. I have another quotation here but I will paraphrase it. Its author is an hon. Member who is in the Chamber at this moment, and whose connection with the cotton industry is not that of a manufacturer of cotton but of the machinery which the industry uses. He was speaking only a few days ago at the annual meeting of his company. I refer to the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Sir W. Preston), who expressed the view, rightly or wrongly—he is in a position which makes him well able to judge the situation—that one of the troubles in the industry was that it had not been modernised. Some may say that he is wrong. But he submitted the point that the purchase of cotton machinery by the British industry had been trifling in recent years compared with the purchases of their foreign competitors. He expressed the opinion that with modern automatic machinery it might very conceivably be possible to compete effectively with Asiatic competitors, those people in Asia who have recently developed this industry with such great success.
Let us imagine that this Bill has become law. My hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich (Mr. A. Ramsay) interrupted the Minister to ask what he meant by wages, whether he meant hourly or piece rates. In this case obviously many of the rates prescribed in the agreement would be piece rates. The moment you introduce a new method of working quite properly you must revise your piece rates. If automatic weaving machinery is a great success—I am not an expert but I understand it may be very successful—obviously it involves at once new piece rates. But the agreement having been drawn up, not by the obscurantist minority but by the majority who may not have adopted these methods, would be in operation. The individual manufacturer, having established his works on entirely new methods, would be compelled to pay piece rates far in excess of what were right. As a matter of fact he could fix lower piece rates to enable him to sell his product much more
cheaply, and at the same time provide his workpeople with higher wages. But under the Bill that becomes impossible.
This Bill means the end of progress. It will make every manufacturer work on exactly the same lines as every other manufacturer. I regard the Bill as a real challenge. It is a Bill which, if followed, is going to mark much more serious things than we realise now. It may represent in principle the future dividing line in the politics of this country. It is not just a Bill affecting the defeatist minority of a despairing industry in one or two counties of this country. The Minister in moving the Second Reading quoted a cotton manufacturer who had written to him anonymously.

Sir H. BETTERTON: Not a manufacturer, a manager.

Mr. WILLIAMS: Then he was on the managing side. I have had a letter from a firm, Messrs. Birtwistle and Fielding, Limited, Great Harwood, who write :
We are pleased to see from the paper that you are opposing the enabling Bill for cotton pacts. We are a non-federated firm. We should like to place a few facts before you. It is very questionable whether the Manufacturers' Association or the trade unions represent 50 per cent. respectively of the people in the trade. It only covers a specified area; those outside will be free to mate separate agreements. It will hamper, impede and restrict progress and initiative. It fails to take into consideration conditions which affect the earning capacity very appreciably. It will tend to increase costs of production, thereby throwing more people out of work.
That is a perfectly frank expression of opinion from a manufacturer who definitely does not approve of the Bill but who belongs, I suppose, to the obscurantist minority, who in the name of Liberalism have lost all their rights in this wide world. I cannot on this occasion congratulate the Minister on his Bill or on the fact that it is a novel idea. There is nothing novel about it. It has been very extensively adopted in several other countries. It has been advocated in this country under the title of national planning, whereby people busy themselves in telling other people how to conduct their business, as in one sense I am doing at this moment. We have in Italy the corporate State. This is the first step towards the corporate State here. I have still to learn that we
have anything to gain by following the example of Italy, which seems to be doing rather badly at the moment. I do not see any advantage in following the example of President Roosevelt or Mr. Hitler or Mr. Stalin. They are all engaged in the same attempt to control industry from above. You may call it a five-year plan in Russia, the corporate State in Italy, or the new deal in America. They all involve the same principle, that you can successfully dominate industry from above.

Mr. MOREING: Has my hon. Friend had any experience of negotiating a trade agreement in any of the countries to which he has referred, especially Fascist Italy?

Mr. WILLIAMS: No, I have not.

Mr. MOREING: In recent years I have had to carry out negotiations for wage agreements under the corporate State in Italy, and the advantage of being able to deal through employers' federations and federations of trade unionists has certainly made the task of arriving at a satisfactory conclusion a much easier one.

Mr. WILLIAMS: I do not doubt that it is a great convenience to do it in that way. But what is the ultimate result, and is it beneficial? On the very day that we were able to announce that our taxes would be reduced and that benefits would be restored in part to those who had lost them—on that very day or within two or three days there was the annuoncement in Italy that everyone's wages would be cut. I am comparing the ultimate result of the two systems, not whether at the moment of making the agreement it is less trouble for the manufacturer to have behind him, in effect, the policeman, in carrying cut negotiations. During the campaign in this country to abandon Free Trade it was universally the case that the Free Traders who were drawn from the Socialist wing or the Liberal wing of the Free Trade party denounced Protection as being the parent of trusts and combines. I have always thought that that was a delusion, and I still think so. I do not see the slightest reason why the adoption by this country of a Protectionist system should of necessity lead to the formation of undesirable trusts and combines.
It is a curious thing that at the moment a very large proportion of the people, I believe a majority of the people who are active at the moment, are deliberately trying to impose on this country trusts and combines. I have actually received letters in which people say that if you are to have a completely satisfactory protective system you must have trusts and combines. I do not believe it. I do not believe that the trust with a statutory monopoly is a good thing for the country, but that it is an evil thing. Because I regard this Bill as a first step in that direction, I am opposing it. I always try to apply to every Measure those principles which in politics I happen to believe to be sound. We all have our political faith. Most of us base that faith on some group of principles, some creed. We may never have written it out. Sometimes we have written it out. Fifteen years ago I was one of a committee of six people, of whom my hon. Friend the Member for South-East Essex (Mr. Raikes), who is to second the Amendment, was another. Our task was to turn into a few sentences the creed of the Conservative party, which had been obscured after four-and-a-half years of war and three years of coalition. We were trying then to build up the Junior Imperial League. We prepared that statement. I do not say it was perfect, but it was a clear-cut statement, and I see no reason now to alter a word of it.
As far as I can make out, this Bill does not fit in with that statement. I believe that you can apply the touchstone of fundamental principles to any Measure, and, if you do, in the long run you get better government than you do when everything is a vague kind of compromise. My view is that a good deal of the so-called progress that we are now making is a progress not to the higher regions but to the lower regions. Progress is sometimes regarded as looking in the same direction as your face is looking. That is not necessarily progress. I believe in progress without pauperisation. That would bring me at once into conflict with some hon. Members. I believe in liberty without licence. I certainly believe in security without slavery. In this Bill we are working for security with slavery. I challenge that principle. I believe that at the moment the principle has a great many adherents in this
country. But some of us oppose it. Some of us believe that ultimately we shall persuade the majority of the people to agree with us that the principle of dominating the people's mind and depriving them of the enterprise and freedom which they have enjoyed in the past, is wrong. It is because we hold those views and because this Bill is a symbol of a new direction of policy, that we oppose it and ask for its rejection.

5.10 p.m.

Mr. RAIKES: I beg to second the Amendment.
I identify myself with some, but not with all, of the criticisms of my hon. Friend the Member for South Croydon (Mr. H. Williams). It was suggested by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mr. Greenwood) that it was a little curious that hon. Members who were not experts on cotton should address the House on a Bill of this kind. My apology and my excuse is that if no hon. Member ever spoke on any subjects except those on which he was an entire expert, the eloquence of my hon. Friends on the Labour benches would often be silenced and we should lose a great deal in this House. Without being a complete expert on any particular industry one is able to consider the question of general principle where principle is involved. Again, my right hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield, I think, was a little unfortunate when he said that no one in the House who sat for a Lancashire or West Riding seat would dare to vote against the Bill. I venture humbly to suggest that hon. Members who are supporting the Bill are supporting it, not because they are afraid that they are going to be injured in their constituencies, but because, rightly or wrongly, they believe that they are right. At the same time we who are critical of the Bill have an equal right to deal with the problem and with the question of principle.
I was impressed by the way in which my right hon. Friend the Minister put forward the case in favour of the Bill. All Members of the House realise that there are great difficulties in the cotton trade and that there is a need for something to be done—I go as far as that—by the Government to enable that industry to become more prosperous. What I fear
in regard to the Bill is not so much its effect as a temporary Measure to deal with difficulties in a great industry under exceptional conditions, but the danger of an extension of the principle of the fixation of wages by bare majorities over the whole industrial field. I tremble at the idea of the day coming when one will see written large all over the country that Manderism in industry has become the order of the day. I am glad nevertheless to see that the hon. Member for East Wolverhampton (Mr. Mander) has cast off one old vice this afternoon. He has uplifted his voice in favour of majority rule. I wonder how long it will be before the hon. Member for East Wolverhampton and his hon. Friends on the second bench below the Gangway, cast away their old vice of Proportional Representation which would mean killing any majority rule at all. It may be that that time will come.
There is another matter which is even more important, as regards Government policy, than the observations of the hon. Member for East Wolverhampton. There is a certain periodical known as the "News Letter" which I understand represents or purports to represent the mind of the Prime Minister and to some extent presumably of the Government. I saw that the "News Letter" last week not only supported this proposal, as it was bound to do but went a stage further and suggested that this hybrid method of the fixation of wages should, with that genius for compromise which we are told is characteristic of the British race, be extended throughout the whole industrial sphere. If the proposal in this Bill is going to become a precedent and a principle then I would say that I would rather see Socialism at its most vigorous come in at the front door, than see it slip in by the back door.
I think every hon. Member here would accept two principles. I think we would agree as to the value of using trade boards as a method of dealing with industries in which wages are exceptionally low and in which, on the other hand, there is no machinery enabling the workers to insist upon a fair deal with their employers. But I think that almost every hon. Member would go a stage further and accept this principle also—that if you have, in any big industry, a small intransigeant minority, holding up the progress of the industry as a whole,
that small minority should be checked and the vast majority, whether employés or employers, should have the power to deal with them. I go as far as that. But in this Bill it is not proposed that the vast majority, say say 80 per cent. or 90 per cent. of the industry, shall have power to ask for an inquiry in order that the 20 per cent. or the 10 per cent. who are keeping things back, shall be brought into line. What we are proposing to do here is to allow a bare majority, 51 per cent. if need be, in this industry—or if the principle is to be extended in any other industry—to demand an inquiry and to seek to impose their will on the 49 per cent.
If that principle were to be carried out in the industries of the nation generally it would mean that we would set up new vested interests. It would tempt powerful organisations of employers or of employés for that matter, to try to kill new competition by persuading boards to insist on fixing wages at such a height that new industries, in the first instance, would not be able to employ men. The result of that would inevitably be that men would fall out of work. We know how men have fallen out of work, in Yorkshire particularly, in the course of the last 10 years because, owing to rigid regulations, industries have been brought to the verge of crashing, which by a temporary reduction could have been saved from that position. But the reduction has not been permitted and in consequence men have been obliged to go out of work who might otherwise have remained in work. That is borne out in a book which many hon. Members may have read, "A Modern Tragedy," which gives a sad picture of what this want of elasticity in regard to wages can do in industry in hard times.
I do not wish to detain the House further on this subject. All I would ask is that the Government should emphasise, as strongly as they can, the fact that this is an experimental Measure and that they do not propose to extend a principle which, though it may be found of use in the cotton industry at the present time, is one which many of us in the Conservative party would fight against as a political principle, and one which we believe we shall be obliged to fight against in the future as much as we have fought against it in the past. I would ask the Government, indeed, when the
Bill is in Committee, to go to the extent of altering the provision which allows a bare majority to have this power and to provide instead that only a substantial majority should have the power to compel a small minority to come in, because it is only a small minority which would hold up an industry. If the Government make the Bill apply to the big majority and the small minority they have a case which no one could seriously criticise. But, on the ground of the danger of the extension of this principle, I venture, not with the desire of embarrassing in any way the Minister or the cotton industry, to support my hon. Friend the Member for South Croydon, and I hope that these criticisms, which represent the views held in a number of quarters, will receive the attention of His Majesty's Government.

5.22 p.m.

Mr. HAMMERSLEY: I think everyone will agree that the two speeches to which we have just listened were interesting and they would have been valuable had they been addressed to some other Measure. But it appears to me that a great deal of their value is lost because they have been based on a misapprehension of what this Bill proposes. Nowadays we hear a great deal about the necessity of reorganising the cotton trade. There are many conflicting opinions about that, and there is a great deal of ill-informed criticism. I do not think, however, it can be seriously contested that, if we are to raise that industry to the higher level of efficiency which is necessary in the national interest, we must ensure that its foundations shall not be continuously disturbed by disputes between employers and employed. This Bill proposes to make those foundations secure. It says, in effect, that when the trade is satisfied and only when the trade is satisfied, on a reasonable wage basis, that basis shall not be disturbed.
It is not a Bill which necessarily stabilises existing wage agreements. Nothing can be done until the Bill becomes an Act. It may be that there are existing wage agreements which are considered desirable and necessary. But, when the Bill has become an Act, employers and employed in the industry will have to get together and arrive at agreement and it is only when they arrive at agreement, having a full knowledge of the facts, that
the Measure becomes effective. Therefore it is not true to say that the Bill perpetuates any unsatisfactory features which may be said to exist at the present time. Nor is it true to say as has been said by the hon. Member for South Croydon (Mr. H. Williams) that the Bill sterilises progress. Let us assume the case which he himself suggested of a new invention or a new method whereby the wages cost in production could be considerably decreased. The individuals concerned, the employers and employés organisations, have merely to give notice within approximately three months and it is obligatory on the Minister, once notice has been given, to take action under Clause 4 which deals with the revocation of orders. It is clear that the Bill does not, in fact, impose anything on the industry at all.
Personally I consider it highly desirable that the rights of minorities should be protected and I have considerable sympathy with what was said by the opponents of the Measure on that point. I do not believe, however, that it is right that a small insignificant minority should hold up progress, prevent organisation and interfere with the proper Government of a large industry. I agree that a substantial minority ought not to be overruled by a bare majority. It may be that a substantial minority would represent the go-ahead section of the industry. There is nothing in the Bill, as I read it, to justify the apprehension that a substantial majority would be over-ruled, but I would like to see the Minister, at a later stage, strengthening Clause 1 so as to make it obligatory on the board to hear substantial minorities. I know that interested parties, as is usually the case in connection with these trade boards, can write to the Minister, but it would be important, if possible, to make it necessary for the board itself to hear substantial minorities who have points for their consideration.
The hon. Member for South-Croydon suggested that this was a Bill introduced by a despairing industry in a defeatist mood. That statement is untrue. The cotton industry is not despairing. If we compare the production of Lancashire in the last few years, with that of any other cotton-producing country in the world—with the single exception of Japan—you will find that the Lancashire cotton trade is in a state of considerable vitality. The
Lancashire cotton trade is continually being accused of inefficiency. I would like to know how that criticism can be substantiated. We must consider that it takes its raw material from thousands of miles away, makes that raw material into manufactured goods, sells its manufactured goods, in greater value and volume than any other manufacturing industry in this country, and exports them to all parts of the world—and it does that to-day just as much as it did in the past. [HON. MEMBERS : "No!"] It is still the largest manufacturing and exporting industry in the country.

Mr. H. WILLIAMS: The engineering industry, if taken in the same wide sense, is definitely a much larger industry.

Mr. HAMMERSLEY: That argument is based on considering the engineering industry as including the manufacture of motor cars and many other new manufactures which, previously, were not considered normal engineering activities but even with that addition the value is approximately the same.

Mr. THORP: Does the hon. Member really mean that the cotton industry exports to the extent that it did in the past?

Mr. HAMMERSLEY: Not in the least. The Lancashire cotton trade has suffered a decline but that decline has taken place in consonance with the decline of the cotton trade of other countries, with the single exception of Japan, and the rate of decline in Lancashire has not been as great as the rate of decline in other cotton-producing countries—again excepting Japan. Therefore the general argument of inefficiency cannot be substantiated. Obviously the industry can be improved. In fact it is being improved. The slackness which came over the industry in the post-War period has in my view been eliminated and although there is much to be done, much is being done.
I would like to make a reference to a charge, which was dealt with by the hon. Member for South Croydon, of general inefficiency made against the Lancashire cotton trade by the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Sir W. Preston)—I have given him notice that I intended to refer to his remarks—at the annual meeting
of Messrs. Platt Brothers, of Oldham. Those observations received great publicity, and they were the subject of a question and answer in this House yesterday. They amount, in effect, to the accusation that a large proportion of the machinery in Lancashire is obsolete, and they constitute a grave reflection on the business ability of those responsible for the conduct of that great industry. The hon. Member said—and I am quoting from the published report :
It is the sad truth that for spinning coarse or medium counts there is not a mill in the British Isles sufficiently well equipped to compete with any one of numberless foreign mills which have been erected during the last 15 years.
I challenge the accuracy of that statement. There are cotton spinning companies in Lancashire equipped to give a greater production of yarn—that is to say, working to a higher level of mechanical efficiency—than in any other country in the world.

Mr. H. WILLIAMS: On a point of Order. This Bill relates to weaving, not spinning.

Mr. HAMMERSLEY: My information is that there are scores of mills in Lancashire working to a higher level of mechanical efficiency than that of any of the foreign mills which have been erected during the last 15 years. There are mills in Lancashire of which I am a director working to an efficiency of production which is considerably greater than Messrs. Platt Brothers or any other firm of textile machinists will guarantee from their latest machinery. If what the hon. Member said is true, there is an easy way in which his contention can be proved. Let Messrs. Platt Brothers equip and run a mill according to their most modern methods and with the most modern machinery. I guarantee that there are mills in Lancashire that, given the same kind of cotton to spin and spinning the same quality of yarn, will beat to-day the production of Platt Brothers' most modern mill. Nothing that I have said should be taken as suggesting that it is not necessary for Lancashire to keep herself thoroughly up-to-date and thoroughly in touch with modern methods and modern machinery, but I do say that the. general charge levied against Lancashire by the hon. Member——

ROYAL ASSENT.

Message to attend the Lords Commissioners.

The House went; and having returned——

Mr. SPEAKER reported the Royal Assent to—

1. Marriage (Extension of Hours) Act, 1934.
2. Arbitration Act, 1934.
3. Supply of Water in Bulk Act, 1934.
4. Firearms Act, 1934.
5. County Courts (Amendment) Act, 1934.
6. Illegal Trawling (Scotland) Act, 1934.
7. Registration of Births, Deaths, and Marriages (Scotland) (Amendment) Act, 1934.
8. Water Supplies (Exceptional Short- age Orders) Act, 1934.
9. Protection of Animals Act, 1934.
10. Ministry of Health Provisional Order Confirmation (Accrington) Act, 1934.
11. Ministry of Health Provisional Order Confirmation (Watford) Act, 1934.
12. Ministry of Health Provisional Order Confirmation (Blackburn) Act, 1934.
13. Ministry of Health Provisional Order Confirmation (Shipley) Act, 1930.
14. South Metropolitan Gas (No. 2) Act, 1934.
15. Church House (Westminster) Act, 1934.
16. Cambridge University and Town Waterworks Act, 1934.
17. Workington Corporation Act, 1934.

COTTON MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY (TEMPORARY PROVISIONS) BILL.

Question again proposed, "That the word 'now' stand part of the Question."

Mr. HAMMERSLEY: When our proceedings were interrupted by Black Rod, I was dealing with certain remarks made by the hon. Member for Cheltenham which have generally been considered as a, reflection on the business ability of the Lancashire cotton trade. The charges, which have been publicly made, are of a character which implies that every mill
in the Lancashire cotton trade engaged in spinning medium or course counts is obsolescent. The exact words are :
There is not a mill in the British Isles sufficiently well equipped.
I am challenging the accuracy of that statement and saying that in that efficiency of equipment and character of machinery which will give the greatest quantity of production from a good type of cotton, there are many mills in Lancashire to-day which will produce as much as and more than the most efficient modern plant which can be laid down. I am glad that the hon. Member is in his place and proposes to say something, because the matter is one of very great importance to the county, and, in my view, his general charge is levied without substantial foundation.
This is a Bill which may be of very great value to the industry. I use the words "may be" because it is the industry itself which is responsible for coming to the agreements. Nothing will be done unless the industry itself agrees, and it is for the industry itself to show whether in fact the Bill does give it that foundation without which the reorganisation of the trade will be very difficult. Frankly, the Bill is an experimental Measure, and for that reason it has a time limit. I take some exception to the remarks of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Wakefield (Mr. Greenwood) who suggested that Lancashire Members dare not vote against the Bill. The Lancashire Members support it because they believe it is a Bill which they think should be supported. Had there been any reasons which might have made it desirable in the minds of Lancashire Members to oppose the Bill, they would certainly have done so, but it is a Bill which, in my view, all sections of the House would be well advised to support, and to which they should give their con-sent.

5.50 p.m.

Sir WALTER PRESTON: I do not often worry the House for I am a poor speaker, and I should not intervene today but the hon. Member for Stockport (Mr. Hammersley) informed me that he proposed to raise a matter which concerned me, and I am bound to answer his challenge. Why is this Bill necessary at all? It is necessary in the cotton trade
only because of the awful state in which that trade finds itself to-day. No other trade has found such a Bill necessary. I am not saying whether the Bill is a good one or a bad one, but I do suggest that it has been introduced because of the state of the cotton trade. Therefore, before we consent to pass such a Bill, we must ask ourselves what is the reason for the cotton trade being in its present state and whether this Bill does anything to help it. I am sorry that the hon. Member for Stockport spoke as he did; he reminds me of the ostrich which hides its head in the sand and thinks that nobody else can see it. All the world knows that the machinery of Lancashire is old. Sir Kenneth Stewart made a statement two or three years ago that the average age of the weaving machinery in Lancashire was 40 years and of the spinning machinery 35. Lancashire has bought practically no machinery since.
My hon. Friend the Member for Stockport finds fault yith a remark I made the other day. I do not qualify it or withdraw it in the slightest. I repeat that there is not in this country one mill spinning coarse or medium counts which has a hope of competing with the mills that are being used in Japan to-day. I have been to Japan. I and my staff went over a large number of mills there, and I am able to compare them with English mills because at my works we have details of the machinery of every English mill as well as every foreign mill. There are no better operatives than those of Lancashire and I have full admiration for them; they are the finest workers in the world, but they are hopelessly handicapped in being asked to use machinery with which they cannot possibly compete with the Japanese weaver and spinner. The hon. Member for Stockport said he himself owned mills which were more efficient than anything else in the world. If he will give me in the Lobby the name of any mill he owns, I will tell him what is necessary to be done to that mill to bring it up to what I call Japanese standard. I am sorry to say he is very wrong in what he says.

Mr. HAMMERSLEY: I take it that the hon. Member is not suggesting that the efficiency of production is to be
measured merely by the age of machinery, and that when he talks about modern machinery he really means efficient machinery, that is to say, machinery which will give the quantity of production which is required. If that is the test, I take on his challenge.

Sir W. PRESTON: By efficient machinery I mean machinery with some hope of competing with the rest of the world. I may have an old motor car 10 or 20 years old which is wearing excellently, but it would be ludicrous for me to take it to Brooklands to compete with modern racing cars. That is what my Lancashire friends are doing to-day. I want to help Lancashire, and because I have come out into the open and tell them what the position is, I am told that I am a bad friend. I think I am a good friend and that my hon. Friend is a very bad friend, for he is encouraging Lancashire to believe that all is well when all is not well. The fact that he is a director of one or two cotton mills would indicate that what he says must be listened to, but frankly he is not a practical man and does not know what he is talking about. Since I made my speech last week I have received a courteous invitation from the Master Cotton Spinners' Federation to go and see them. I am hoping to see them next Thursday, and I am sure that when I meet them I shall be able to put before them such overwhelming proof of my case that I shall convince them of the two chief things that I said in my speech.
My first point is that there is not a mill in this country which can hope to-compete with Japan. My second point, which is by far the more important point, is that, given modern preparation machinery, modern high draft ring spindles and automatic looms, the Lancashire operative, who is the best man in the world, can produce and market in India grey cloth, which is the big staple purchase in India, at a price considerably below the price at which Japan is selling to-day. The Lancashire manufacturer is a bit shy of owning up officially that his machinery is obsolete, but if you talk to him and let him see you know what you are talking about he will admit he ought to scrap the lot, but he will say that he has no money.
The hon. Member for Stockport accused me of criticising our Lancashire manufacturers. I am not criticising their business capacity. I am criticising their lack of finance. They know that their machines are obsolete, but they have no money with which to replace them. During the boom in Lancashire 10 or 12 years ago the bulk of the liquid cash was taken out of the county by certain unscrupulous financiers, and the county today has got no money. If you go to a financier and say, "Will you give me some money for Lancashire machinery?" he smiles at you as if you were loony. If you go to the bank and ask for money, they reply, "We are very sorry, but we have burnt our fingers already, and are not taking any more risks."
Lancashire cannot get money without Government help. They are a very charming, but stiff-necked people. I have told Lancashire that this is what they ought to do to put their house in order. They must first close permanently all obsolete mills and close all redundant mills, so that the remaining mills can work 100 per cent. output. They must renovate the mills that are left with really modern machinery and group them in a small number of units allied with batteries of automatic looms so that the mad internal competition which is going on in Lancashire will be stopped. Lancashire wants a proper sales organisation for each group and a pledge among the groups that they will join in a price control system. Last, and almost as important as anything, Lancashire wants to use Indian or Empire cotton.
Much can and should be done. People in Lancashire to whom you talk agree that that is what they would like to do, but they do not see any way of doing it because there is no money. I suggest to the Government that this is the time when they can help. What happened 10 years ago is not the fault of the present people in Lancashire. It is not the operative's fault; he is losing his job. If you want to give a fair deal to the operatives and the working people in Lancashire who are interested in cotton, the Government should come forward, as they did in connection with the Cunard Line, and say, "We will help you, but on conditions. We will only help you on condition that you group yourselves into a few large, easily-handled groups,
of 5,000,000 or 6,000,000 spindles. We will only lend you money if such groups have proper sales organisations. We will only lend you money if you undertake to join a price control association, and only lend you money if, for every one new spindle you put down, you will scrap two obsolete spindles." If the Government would do that, from figures I have got I am confident that very large profits could be made. And if I were in the Government I would advise them, if they lent money, to put in a final clause that no dividend exceeding 5 per cent. should be paid by any mill which had Government help—and a profit of 5 per cent. today in a cotton mill is looked upon as almost beyond the dreams of avarice—unless they had first of all paid off their Government loan.
There is every excuse to be made for my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport because when the figures showing what could be done by modern machinery for automatic weaving were first brought to me I was startled, and I would not believe them myself. But I have since been through those figures; I have had some half-dozen very hard-headed Lancashire spinners and weavers checking them; my own accountants have been through them; a firm of chartered accountants have also been through them, and we cannot find that they are wrong. If they are not wrong, then a modern English mill, with weaving shed attached, equipped with automatic looms, can sell grey cotton cloth in India a halfpenny a pound cheaper than Japan is charging to-day. A halfpenny a pound is an enormous profit in the cotton trade. I was told by a well-known spinner that a saving of one-sixteenth of a penny in the cost of his spinning meant a 5 per cent. dividend, and yet our figures show that we can market in India at a halfpenny per pound cheaper than Japan is doing to-day.
With the whole of Lancashire practically heading straight down the road to bankruptcy, with 80 mills closed in Oldham alone, the unemployment bill must be enormous in that county, and I suggest that this proposal is one which should be looked into by the Government. It is worth their while to loan £9,500,000 to the Cunard and White Star Lines in order to build a ship to regain the blue riband of the Atlantic and to find employment for a certain number of
men in the shipbuilding trade. Here is an opportunity to find double employment; because if we re-equip our mills and our weaving sheds we shall first employ builders and machinery builders and, when the mills are finished, we shall have all the mill hands at work again. I apologise for speaking on this matter at all, because as chairman of a textile machinery combine I am an interested party, and much as I want to help Lancashire I should not have dreamed of rising but for the fact that the hon. Member for Stockport has raised this matter, and challenged me so strongly. I do hope, however, that the Government will give some attention to what I have said.

6.4 p.m.

Mr. TINKER: I claim the right to take part in this Debate because Lancashire is mentioned, and I am the representative of a division in Lancashire, and have been a witness of the circumstances which have led to the introduction of this Bill. I remember a Debate in the House not long ago in which the Minister was pressed from this side of the House to take some action along these lines. We asked him if he could get common consent among the employers and workmen to bring in a Bill of this character and he said he would do what he could to bring that about. That is why I welcome the Bill. For some time past we have had agreements in Lancashire between employers and workmen, and they have been honourably carried out for a period, but, owing to the distress largely brought about by the causes which have been mentioned—inefficient machinery and things like that—some employers have found that they could not sell their produce at a price which would enable them to make profits while paying the stipulated wages. Then they have said to the workmen, "I cannot keep on with my concern unless you are prepared to accept a lower rate of wages," and, unless the men would consent to that, the employers have broken away from the agreement and forced lower wages on them. That kind of thing could not go on for any length of time without something being done, and as a trade unionist I am very strongly in favour of protection being given to them in this way.
I belong to the coal industry. We are more highly organised than the cotton
industry, but we constantly meet with cases where employers try to break away from agreements, and it requires all the pressure of the good employers to make them toe the line. But we manage to do it, and what is good for the coal industry ought to be good for the cotton industry. Up to the moment, however, the cotton industry has not been quite equal to the occasion, and has had to ask the Government to help it, and therefore we have this Bill, which to my mind is a very fair Measure. It states that when both sides, the employers and the workmen, come to a common understanding on wage agreements, Parliamentary sanction shall be given to those agreements. Surely no one can complain of that. I do not think any hon. Member opposite would argue that if 5 per cent. of the employers wanted to break away from an agreement they ought to be allowed the privilege of doing so, in opposition to the other 95 per cent. of the employers. The Bill provides that if at any time either side, as a body, want to break away from the agreement because the state of the industry does not warrant the payment of the wages, they can appeal to the Minister, and the Minister, after an inquiry, can sanction the greaking of the agreement after three months' notice. Further, if the Minister finds that the industry is not able to meet the wages call upon it—or for any other reason—he has power to dissolve the agreement after a certain length of time.
The hon. Member who moved the rejection of the Bill made certain statements which seem to me to be very difficult to back up. He did not want to support a Government which was attempting to bolster up certain industries; he wanted them to be free to protect themselves, and not to look to Parliament for protection. Not long ago, however, he himself introduced a Bill to force all electors to record their votes, and those who did not do so were to be fined. He is not in favour of allowing electors to have freedom to do as they wish, and yet when something is to be done to meet obvious difficulties in the cotton industry, the hon. Member calls for free play and says that nobody ought to be coerced. He read a letter from a non-federated employer which appeared to me to afford ample justification for
this Bill. The writer of that letter stated that he wanted freedom to do just as he liked, he wanted to break away from all agreements, and said that in that way he would be able to keep his mill working. If we follow that argument to its logical conclusion it means that any employer who cannot pay the standard rate of wages has only to say to his workmen "All right, if you do not accept a lower rate of pay you must be out of work." If we were to accept that line of reasoning we could have no governing agreements in any industry.
Therefore, I can support this Bill with some degree of satisfaction, and the more so because it is opposed by the hon. Member for South Croydon (Mr. H. Williams). Our views are so entirely opposed on most matters that it helps me to back the Government when I know that Members like him are against it. As one of the five Labour Members for Lancashire—we are now only five out of 66, the other 61 being National Government men—I want to raise my voice on behalf of the cotton industry. I believe that this Bill is a means to protect that industry, and I believe it will give great satisfaction to many of the mill operatives. If the Bill proves satisfactory, as I believe it will, I hope that there will be a great extension of legislation of this character. There is one point in the Bill to which I wish to draw attention. Clause 3, paragraph (b) states :
if any employer pays to a person employed in the industry of a class affected by the agreement wages at a rate less than the rate applicable in his case under the order, the employer shall (without prejudice to any proceedings under the last foregoing paragraph) be liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding ten pounds.
Let us assume that an employer has not paid the rate of wages agreed upon and is found to be guilty. Do I take it that the workmen will be able to recover all the arrears of pay which are owing to them? I do not find any specific statement on that point in the Bill. I assume that that is implied, but I should like the Minister to be quite definite on that point, because lawyers find many loopholes in Acts of Parliament. If that right is not clearly established in the Bill I would like it to be made definite during the Committee proceedings. If that is done, I think the Bill is well worth the support of the House.

6.14 p.m.

Mr. HAMILTON KERR: The Minister of Labour, in his admirable speech, has so concisely outlined the main proposals of this Bill, that I wish to devote myself, in the few minutes I intend to keep the House, to discussing its main principles. This Bill confines its purview to wages, it hedges itself about with numerous restrictions and safeguards. Nevertheless hon. Members who oppose it claim that its propositions impinge upon the liberty of the individual. Civil law allows a man freedom of conscience, of thought and even of action, provided he does not injure his fellows. But if he injures them or steals or murders, then the law lays a heavy hand upon him. That principle is equally applicable to industry. It may be that, in the cotton industry, the intense internal competition now prevailing gives for a certain time a temporary advantage to one individual, but this temporary advantage may in the long run be a serious disadvantage to other members of the industry.
As I listened to the speech of the hon. Member for South Croydon (Mr. H. Williams) I imagined that I was listening to one of the perorations that so often echoed through the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, in the nineteenth century. It was pure Liberal doctrine. The great Tory traditions of Shaftesbury and Disraeli insisted upon interference with industry when bad conditions prevailed, and upon the State stepping in to intervene in the cotton industry. The traditions of laissez faire, which prevailed in the nineteenth century, doubtless benefited that industry when markets were rapidly expanding and cotton goods found a ready outlet all over the world—in Asia, America and Africa. But in these days, when Japanese competition has so terribly limited the markets at our disposal, drastic internal competition does infinite damage to the trade as a whole. I am therefore convinced that this Measure, which is the first of its kind and is experimental in its nature, will prove of benefit to the industry, provided that it can be made to work.
It is significant that Lancashire, traditionally the home of laissez faire, has provided so many influential men in all sections of the community willing to give this experiment support. I, for one, if this experiment succeeds, and if it finds acceptance in the cotton industry, will not
suffer agonies of conscience if the principle is extended to other industries. A farmer who was a father of twins wired to his relations, "Twins to-day. More to-morrow." When industry is passing through a transitional stage, every movement must be purely experimental, and I, for one, welcome this step, and heartily support the Minister.

6.18 p.m.

Mr. FLEMING: I entirely agree with the hon. Member for Oldham (Mr. H. Kerr) with reference to the hon. Member for South Croydon (Mr. H. Williams) on the question of it being a Tory principle to interfere with business. This Bill purports to interfere with the great cotton industry in Lancashire. I remember 12 years ago, when I first took part in politics, that I had the temerity to oppose a very great Free Trader like the late Mr. Stephen Walsh, and hardly a Conservative Minister would assist me in the campaign because I was a Protectionist. I believed then, as I do now, in interference in industry where that is necessary. I believe that the breaking of agreements which has been going on in the Lancashire cotton industry for the last two years has risen to such serious proportions that it is high time the Government brought in such a Bill as that which I welcome to-day.
There are points in the Bill which need elucidation. One example of that is the word "majority" in Clause 1. That could mean, as has already been pointed out, a majority of one over the half-way line, or of one under the total. An hon. Member has pointed out that you might have—although i doubt it very much in the Lancashire weaving industry—a case of 51 against 49, and the majority of 51 would then, of course, be entitled, if the Bill became law, to impose their will upon the minority of 49. That is how I read the word "majority," and the hon. Member for Stockport (Mr. Hammersley) evidently reads it in the same way, because when he addressed the House he introduced the phrase "substantial minority." He pressed the Minister of Labour to take steps to enable what he called substantial minorities to be heard before the board which it is proposed to appoint. If the hon. Member for Stockport had not read into the word
" majority "the same idea that comes into my mind when I see the word, I do not think that he would have been tempted to use the phrase "substantial minority."
I urge the Minister to consider the question of altering the word "majority," or of amplifying it in some way, so that it would enable substantial minorities to be heard before the board, and would exclude the possibility of anything like a substantial minority being repressed by the will of what we might call an insubstantial minority. I do not think that in the Lancashire weaving industry with which this Bill deals, there is any danger at the present time of any substantial minority being oppressed by Clause 1. From what I know from personal experience in different parts of Lancashire, and particularly around Darwen, Blackburn and Preston, wage-cutting is not being carried on by any substantial minority. It is being carried on by some of the friends of the hon. Member for South Croydon, who are using the wage-cutting and price-cutting method in order to injure firms who have been honourably keeping to their agreements and to injure the trade unions who look after the welfare of the operatives.
The main reason why I support the Bill is because the matter was brought to the notice of nearly every Lancashire Member who is interested in the cotton industry, before the last Election, and at the last election, when there was much discussion about foreign competition as affecting the Lancashire cotton industry. It was suggested by some of our laissez faire friends that there was a method of meeting foreign competition by the reduction of the operatives' wages. I made it well known throughout the division which I fought that I would never agree to any system which would injure the wages at present obtaining in the Lancashire cotton industry, and that I would do everything I possibly could to raise those wages if that were possible. I shall certainly do everything I can to prevent the wages from being reduced to the level that obtains in some of the countries which are at the present time, unfortunately, successfully competing with the Lancashire cotton industry. That is one of the strongest reasons why I am delighted that the Bill has been brought forward.
Lancashire hon. Members when they go among their Lancashire friends are asked time and time again, "What are the National Government doing for the cotton industry?" Here we have a specific reply. At last an attempt is being made, on the recommendation of employers and employés, to do something for that industry. I believe that the Bill will help to set it upon a firm foundation. I do not believe that it will solve all the troubles in the textile industry nor does anyone else in this House, but I am glad that the Government have at last made a start to assist, and I hope that this will not be the last attempt, but may merely be the beginning of several attempts to help the Lancashire cotton industry.

6.26 p.m.

Lieut.-Commander ASTBURY: I congratulate the Minister heartily on bringing forward this Bill. It is one that we have needed for some years in Lancashire, in order to provide that when employers and employés have come to an agreement as to the rate that shall be paid, neither party shall be allowed to break away and that the agreement shall be a statutory obligation, with the option of giving notice to break it after three months. One of the salient points which have not been mentioned in connection with this Bill is that there are employers who will get cheap, non-union labour from outside the federation. When the hon. Member for South Croydon (Mr. H. Williams) read the letter, that was from outside the federation and is about the strongest argument that he could have used in favour of the Bill. Those firms undercut firms which are paying their employés properly. Not only do they take away orders, but if they lower the price of their commodity by as much as one halfpenny per yard, that reduction lowers the price of the commodities practically throughout Lancashire.
The Lancashire cotton trade is going through a terrible time. We have had to substitute a lot of home trade for our foreign trade, and the firms to which I have alluded are putting their goods into the home-market at low prices which are not necessitated by the circumstances. They could get higher prices quite easily, they would be able to pay their employés properly, and the whole trade would derive great benefit. I am not going to
criticise this Bill, because I do not believe that any Amendment of it is required. The Minister does not interfere with the industry; what happens is that employers and employés come to an arrangement among themselves, and then the Minister says——

Mr. H. WILLIAMS: The Bill does this : When two people come to an agreement, that agreement is imposed upon somebody else.

Lieut.-Commander ASTBURY: Not at all. If one party breaks an agreement, the parties go into the law courts in order to see that the agreement is prevented from being broken. In this case it is the Minister who says, "I will see that the agreement is kept."

Mr. WILLIAMS: If two people make an agreement, the Bill has nothing to do with that position. This is a position in which two people can come to an agreement and other parties are compelled to agree to it.

Lieut.-Commander ASTBURY: The hon. Member makes my argument all the stronger. If 5 per cent. of firms are working with badly-paid labour and are sweating their people to try to get an order or two out of the man who is paying decent wages, that minority should be brought in and be compelled also to pay decent wages. That is why the Minister should be able to say, "You must pay decent wages."
I want now to leave the Bill for a few minutes in order to deal with a statement made by my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Sir W. Preston), which threw a serious aspersion on Lancashire. It was one of the wildest statements that I have ever heard in this House, and not one-half of it was true. My hon. Friend says that all the machinery in Lancashire is obsolete, and ought to be scrapped. He is a maker of machinery himself, and he says he has been to Japan. Was he there for the purpose of studying machinery, or for the purpose of selling the Japanese some machinery? However, I will let that question pass, but I should have been glad if my hon. Friend had been in the House to answer this question : Eight years ago he was a party to putting the machinery into a spinning mill within easy distance of Manchester, and he took
his money for that machinery in shares. A few months ago that mill went bankrupt. So much for his modern machinery, and so much for the rest of Lancashire which has not a machine that can compete with the Japanese.
What is the use of my hon. Friend talking about improving the automatic loom when he knows perfectly well that the trade unions will not agree to the operatives working automatic looms? Let my hon. Friend tell us something that is constructive. It is all very well for him to say, "Get the operatives in Lancashire to run 40 looms for 120 hours a week, as the Japanese do, and I will show you how to compete with the Japanese." If he can do that I am with him, but to put an impossible proposition before the House, and to let it go out to the world that Lancashire is totally inefficient and that its machinery is obsolete from top to bottom, will not only do Lancashire a great deal of harm, but is an extraordinary perversion of the truth. I would offer a challenge to my hon. Friend in regard to my own works, just as my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Mr. Hammersley) has thrown out a challenge. The cloth in my works goes over the machines at the rate of 120 yards a minute. If my hon. Friend will come down to my place and will increase my production beyond 120 yards a minute, then I will order machines from him. I want to make that offer because, whenever we speak about the state of the Lancashire cotton trade, we are always told that we are not efficient, that our machinery is not up to date, and that we do not know how to run our places as well as foreign firms do. There is only one thing in which I agree with my hon. Friend, and that is with regard to the banks. It is not a question of attacking the banks, but the policy of the banks to-day is of no use to the trade of this country. If one wants an overdraft to-day——

Mr. SPEAKER: The hon. Member for Stockport (Mr. Hammersley) has already replied to the same charge, and the hon. and gallant Member is doing so again. I think he has gone far enough now, and ought not to pursue the subject any further. It has nothing to do with the Bill.

Lieut.-Commander ASTBURY: I apologise, of course, if I have gone too far. I
only intervened because, the matter having been raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport, and a charge having been made by my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham, I felt, as one who is engaged in the cotton trade, that I should like to reply.

6.36 p.m.

Mr. ENTWISTLE: This Bill only applies to the Lancashire cotton manufacturing industry, and it is submitted that the whole of Lancashire, as far as I have been able to gather, is in support of the Bill. As far as the Members representing Lancashire constituencies in this House are concerned, the Bill has been before their Committee, of which I have the honour to be the Chairman, and I can tell the House that not one voice was raised there in criticism of the Bill; so we can take it that, as far as Lancashire Members are concerned, there is unanimous support for the Bill. As regards the various sections of the cotton trade, the Bill, of course, only affects the manufacturing and weaving section. That section, I understand, supports the Bill, and the other sections view it with favour. It is, therefore, significant that Lancashire, which has always been attacked as being unable to reorganise because of the individualistic temperament and character of the Lancashire employer, should be supporting this Bill, and that its main antagonist should be the hon. Member for South Croydon (Mr. H. Williams), who has used analogies such as the Russian system, the Italian system, and various other bogeys which are raised about the Bill.
The hon. Member for South Croydon has at any rate always been an ardent Protectionist, and the one thing that Protection does is to interfere with free competition in the interests of the State as a whole. It is really absurd to talk of this Bill as introducing any of the dangers of Socialism. All of those restriction schemes which, under the economic conditions of the world, are now generally recognised as necessary for making industry more prosperous—I am speaking of restriction schemes such as those applied to tin, rubber and other commodities—have required Government sanction to make them effective, and that, after all, is all that this Bill does. It only comes into operation if the representatives of both sides of the
industry agree—they have not only to be representative of a majority, but they have to agree—and in that case the Government has to come in in order to give the agreement statutory effect. What the hon. Member for South Croydon is really advocating is a position like that of members of a trade union who indulge in an unofficial strike contrary to their own union, but he would be the first Member of the House to denounce action of that kind. Now, however, in opposing this Bill, he is supporting those blackleg manufacturers who are trying to get an exceptional advantage by paying lower rates of wages than the bulk of the employers in the county.

Mr. H. WILLIAMS: I do not want to interrupt my hon. and learned Friend, but, after all, that is quite an unfounded charge. It is made by people who do not understand the basis of fixing wages. Obviously, while you may have imposed on an industry a rigid system of wages, if you re-equip a mill on entirely new lines, as I explained in my speech, you must have lower piece rates. That does not necessarily mean lower weekly earnings; the earnings may be higher; but under the system of this Bill nobody in the industry will be entitled to alter the piece rates, because they will be tied by the agreement.

Mr. ENTWISTLE: I do not think that any Member of the House will credit the statement which my hon. Friend has just made. An agreement with regard to wages deals with piece rates as well as with hour rates, and it is absurd to think that, if there are new inventions and so on, those piece rates can never be altered because they are in the agreement. The representatives of the two organisations would themselves substitute a new agreement applying the piece rates which are appropriate to the new inventions. Besides, there are other provisions in the Bill for revoking and terminating an agreement if either of the two organisations requires the Minister to do so. I still assert that what the Bill does is merely to deal with the small recalcitrant minority who, quite apart from the interests of the community as a whole, and of their industry in particular, are trying to seize a mean advantage at the expense of the great bulk of the employers who are considering, not only their own interests, but the interests of the industry
as a whole, and, in the long run, the interests even of that minority, for ultimately their interests are wrapped up in the prosperity of the industry. But it is always the case that, however clear it may be that a certain course of conduct pursued by individuals must ultimately result detrimentally to those individuals, still, if they can see an immediate advantage, they are shortsighted enough to try to seize it, letting the future look after itself, and hoping for the best. It is not in the interests of the Lancashire cotton industry, and it is not in the interests of the industry of this country as a whole, to encourage that sort of thing.
Another reason why I am in favour of the Bill has been mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Mr. Hammersley), and that is that Lancashire is constantly being urged to reorganise itself. Strenuous efforts are now being made to arrive at agreements among the different sections of the cotton trade on the very things which my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Sir W. Preston) says it is necessary for Lancashire to do if she is to be prosperous, such as dealing with redundant machinery, price-fixing, and other matters. Lancashire is working very hard at the moment to get agreements on these schemes, but everyone recognises that the complexities of the trade make it extraordinarily difficult to arrive at such agreements. If, however, reorganisation is to be practicable, one of the essential things is that wages agreements arrived at by representatives of both sides shall be faithfully carried out, and shall not be allowed to be upset by the action of a small minority. Therefore, by passing this Bill, which, after all, is an agreed Measure and represents a specific practical step which can now be carried out, we shall in fact be helping towards that reorganisation of the Lancashire cotton trade about which we are all agreed.

6.43 p.m.

Mr. PETHERICK: The hon. and learned Member for Bolton (Mr. Entwistle) has just made a very powerful defence of the Bill. It has been interesting to observe during the Debate to-day the strong concurrence of opinion among hon. Members who are normally bitter opponents. As my hon. Friend the Member for South Croydon (Mr. H. Williams)
observed some little time ago, that rather makes one suspicious of the merits of the Bill, and perhaps on that account some of us have looked rather more carefully for flaws in it than otherwise we should have done. One hon. Member said earlier that it was hard that Members other than those who sit for cotton divisions should intervene at all. If we were a "corporate State," obviously only experts would speak on any given subject. Experts find it notoriously difficult to agree among themselves, and, when they do agree among themselves, one generally finds that it is at the expense of some third party.
There appear to be certain flaws in the Bill, which have been pointed to by various speakers. The Minister of Labour at the beginning of the Debate pointed out, I understand, that the Bill had been brought in at the instance of representatives of both employers and employed in a very large majority. It is very interesting to know that, because the Bill provides that only a bare majority of employers and employed is needed to secure the fixation of wages. I freely admit that there is a provision to safeguard that position in Clause 1 (4). The board have to be satisfied that the organisations are representative, and that there is a majority, but the board also have to be satisfied that it is expedient that such an Order should be issued. Therefore, after they have examined the case put up by both sides, there is an opportunity for the board to say, "This is only a very small majority which desires the wages to be fixed, and we do not think that it is expedient at the instance of 51 per cent. of the trade to fix wages at the expense of the disagreement of 49 per cent.," and I think the board would quite reasonably come to the conclusion that a substantial majority was not only advisable, but necessary. But it does not say so in the Bill, and, although this may be a Committee point, I think it is quite proper that it should be ventilated on the Second Reading, so that the Committee may pay very careful attention to it.
As the hon. Member for South Croydon, with whom I am in substantial agreement in many of his arguments, said, the Bill presents a grave danger in that you are enforcing contracts made by two parties
upon a third. It is admittedly a recalcitrant minority, but it is certainly a very grave step to impose agreement such as this on those who do not desire it. Of course, if you assume that there is only going to be a recalcitrant minority of 5 per cent., if it be in the interest of the vast majority that a certain rate of wages should be fixed, that rate of wages ought to be fixed, but I feel that a definite figure should be laid down in the Bill of the percentage that is required to enable the Bill to be enforced.

Mr. ENTWISTLE: I do not think I said 5 per cent. I did not mean to say it.

Mr. PETHERICK: The hon. Member for Leigh (Mr. Tinker) mentioned 5 per cent. The hon. Member for South Croydon pointed to another very grave danger. The Bill only affects a certain area and it is at least possible that a new company might be formed to exploit a certain invention with almost unlimited money behind it and it might decide to start a factory in the South of England. The wages agreement would not apply and they might well be able to undercut the whole of Lancashire.
Whether or not the machinery of the Lancashire cotton industry is inefficient I am not competent to judge. We have had many stalwart speeches in defence of the efficiency of the methods and the machinery of Lancashire. It is a very odd thing that, when some of the Lancashire Members are endeavouring to urge the Government to take strong steps to deal with Japanese competition, one of the main points generally seems to be that it is difficult for Lancashire to compete owing to the fact that so much of the machinery is out of date and that they cannot get money to instal fresh machinery. But to-day we have seen quite the other argument used in connection with this Bill. For the reasons that I have mentioned I am very doubtful as to the advisability of the Bill. At the same time I believe that, with one or two Amendments, it is worth trying out. If it is found to be successful, if it is found that the operation of the Bill does not necessarily mean that industry always goes at the pace of the slowest and the most inefficient, if it is found after a period of time to work smoothly, I believe it might be extended with advantage to other industries. I feel that we should go very carefully when we are imposing on a minority wages arranged
in effect by a majority. Although I agree with the hon. Member for South Croydon in his objections to the Bill, both in principle and in practice, I feel that on the whole it is worth giving it a Second Reading.

6.51 p.m.

Mr. SUTCLIFFE: We have listened to yet another speech from a Member who represents the sunny South based largely on hypothetical fears of what may possibly happen in the future. Today we are dealing with realities, and we are only dealing with Lancashire, in fact only with a certain part of Lancashire—the weaving industry—and with conditions as they are at the moment. I rise to give my full support to the Bill, which in my opinion is a good and workmanlike Measure. It will be of considerable benefit to the Lancashire cotton trade as a whole, both employers and employed. It has the support of Lancashire, and that redoubles the value of the Bill, because the people of Lancashire are an extremely independent race, and the fact that they have come and asked the Government to give them their aid gives much greater force to their plea than would otherwise be the case. It is a Bill, too, which has been wanted for years. If anything it is long overdue. It has often been said, "Lancashire does not know what it wants. If only they would make up their mind what they want, we should be able to act." If there be any truth in that allegation—and I think there has been some—Lancashire does now know what it wants and has come to ask us to enforce it. Let us not allow the opportunity to slip by.
The Bill does not interfere with any of the trade relations that exist in the industry. There is nothing unusual in it. The suspicions that have been brought forward by some who have been opposing it are largely unfounded. The only unusual thing about it is that the Opposition are supporting it. To my mind, that adds very great weight to our point and again redoubles the value of the Bill. It is essential that some system of wage regulation should be put into force if the trade is to continue. The Bill is voluntary. The Government are not trying to force its own conclusions on those who do not want them. As the Minister said, the Government are hoping to help the trade to help itself, and Government action is to be at a minimum. It may
be suggested that Lancashire independence arid enterprise is everything, but with all this under-cutting going on we cannot allow Lancashire enterprise to take its own course as regards this section of the industry. Is not that exactly what has been happening in Japan? Japan has been cutting prices, cutting prices and cutting prices again and has captured the trade by methods which have lowered the standards of the people and the conditions in the industry. Price cutting can only lead eventually to sweated labour. Wages are low enough already. They are at the very rock bottom, and I think the Bill will tend to encourage them to rise.
We are not asking that hours should be regulated or wages fixed or the number of looms per man fixed. We are only asking that, if the majority in the trade agrees that a certain wage agreement should be imposed on all in the interests of the trade, the Government should enforce it. Progress towards industrial recovery in Lancashire has been extremely slow. It has not kept pace with the progress in some other parts of the country. I think the Bill will be a help to hurry on that progress, and, combined with the action of the President of the Board of Trade the other day in regard to quotas on foreign imports into our Colonies, will be a definite help to Lancashire trade.

6.58 p.m.

Mr. McCORQUODALE: The Bill in itself is of limited scope. It does not even deal with the whole of the cotton industry, but only with one section of it. It is hedged about with restrictions and safeguards. But, as the hon. Member for South Croydon (Mr. H. Williams) remarked, it shows a great departure from present and past practice and introduces a new principle which I heartily welcome. I believe the day of laissez faire and Free Trade is, for the time being at any rate, over, and how you can have unfair competition when it is with a foreign country and when it is with your next door neighbour call it fair competition, when in fact it is exactly the same thing, I fail to see.
I realise that this is an experimental Bill. We shall watch it working with great interest. If it be worked aright, it will be of great advantage to industry in the rest of the country. I believe that
in the future all organised trades and industries will require powers of this sort. Having put themselves in order, they will come to the Government and say, "We can rule ourselves. Give us the power to rule ourselves." I strongly believe that the argument of the future between Socialists and anti-Socialists in the conduct of industry will be that we anti-Socialists will claim that industries should be allowed to run themselves, while I have no doubt that the Front Bench of the future will continue to claim that it should run them. That will be, in the future, the grounds of difference between us. I am therefore delighted to see that, so early in the Debate, they have somewhat left that point of view and are delightedly acclaiming the right of industry to run itself without State ownership.
If I could have the Minister's attention for a moment, I should like to refer to two minor points. One is the remarkable list on page 7. I believe that the Minister, like the Lord President of the Council and other hon. Members, is a great lover of the English language and of old English place-names. If he had wished to make a collection of old English place-names, be could not have done better than those he has written down on page 7. They are true to life. I will not read them all out, but will read a few :
The Borough of Todmorden, the Urban Districts of Barnoldswick, Earby, Hebden Bridge, Luddenenfoot, Mytholmroyd, Saddle-worth, Silsden.
They are marvellous names; and we have, a little lower down :
The Parishes of Charlesworth, Chisworth, and Ludworth, in the Rural District of Chapel-en-le-Frith.
You could not have a better list. Nevertheless, the industry to which it is proposed that the Bill should refer should have been defined in explicit terms and not by the place where the industry works upon which we propose to place this measure of control. Half my constituency is covered by these picturesque names, and the other half, though equally well fitted for cotton spinning, is not covered. Anachronisms of that sort should not be introduced into the Bill. I would ask the Minister whether in Committee or at some later stage he could regard these places, not from the point of view of the picturesqueness of their names but from
the point of view of their efficiency, and eliminate the method of area description of industry in favour of an exact description of the industry itself.
There is only one other minor point to which I should like to refer, and which has been referred to by many hon. Members. That is the definition of "majority." It is obvious that a narrow majority is not what is indicated in this Bill, but a substantial majority. A definition of what constitutes a substantial majority would be an improvement in the Bill. Nevertheless, with those two small criticisms, I should like to add my strong support to the Bill and to the principle on which it is based.

7.3 p.m.

Mr. RICKARDS: There is one point which I do not think has been sufficiently brought out, and which is hardly ever mentioned in this House. This country has pulled round considerably in the last three years. On our side we might say that this recovery has been due to Protection; on the other side, hon. Members might claim that it was due to our going off the Gold Standard; the Socialist party might say that the trade of the world has improved. Those reasons are all true, but there is a fourth point which we are apt to overlook. During recent years we have had fewer strikes and fewer lock-outs than any country in the world. Because we have had peace on the home front, we have succeeded well elsewhere. Those of us who live up in these districts—I happen to live near Skipton, Barnoldswick and these nice places—realise the unpleasantness that is likely to happen unless some Bill like this is carried through. It is likely to lead to civil war, which is the most unpleasant type of war in the world. It is setting village against village, works against works, and families against families. That is what we want to avoid. We want employers and employed to pull together. Hon. Members who have been in the trade, or in trades, will realise what an awful nuisance a very few people can be. I happen to be chairman of one business; it is not in the cotton trade but it is germane to this extent : For 12 months we have been trying to come to an agreement; 95 per cent. of us have agreed and the other 5 per cent. have held the thing up. That is the sort of situation we want to avoid and of which the Government are
trying to relieve us. I hope that the Bill will pass rapidly, and I can assure the Government that it will have the best wishes and thanks and the cordial support of all those who sit on this bench.

7.5 p.m.

Mr. MICHAEL BEAUMONT: I make no apology, as another Member of the Sunny South, representing the consumers, for intervening in the Debate on this Bill. It is not, as one hon. Member said, merely the question of a cotton Bill dealing with Lancashire only. The case WEIS stated by the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, East (Mr. Mander) and by the hon. Member for Sowerby (Mr. McCorquodale), that this is the first time that this form of organisation has been imposed upon or granted to an industry. If it is successful, it will be followed by other similar charters or impositions upon other industries.

Mr. HOLDSWORTH: Would the hon Member tell me the difference between this Bill and the principle of the fixing of wages under the Trade Boards?

Mr. BEAUMONT: That is not applied to one industry only. This, as has been pointed out by the hon. Member for Sowerby, empowers a particular industry to run itself.

Mr. HOLDSWORTH: I happen to be an employer of labour ruled by a Trade Board. They do apply to definite industries. I know that they can act for different industries, but they do decide on the minimum wages which shall be paid in an industry. What is the difference between those Trade Boards and these organisations?

Mr. BEAUMONT: Under this Bill the matter is decided primarily by the two sides of an industry itself, by the majority rule of the industry. That does not affect my point, because this is the forerunner—as has been admitted—or may be the forerunner, of many similar Bills for other industries. This is, therefore, the moment when the advantages and the dangers of this system should be stressed, not only by the members of the industry to which it is applied, but also by members of other industries to which similar systems may be applied in the future. I do not think that any hon. Member at this time of day will suggest that it is a good thing to leave matters to the old-
fashioned, cut-throat, free competition. I do not think that there is anybody in the House who would perpetuate a state of things such as has just been referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton (Mr. Rickards), by which a small minority and—as I am prepared to believe, from my knowledge of the hon. Member, a wrong-headed minority—should hold up a scheme indefinitely. I was much interested to note the strong belief of the hon. Member for East Wolverhampton (Mr. Mander) in the unimportance of minorities and the importance of majorities; I only hope that one day he will carry that belief into international and other spheres.

Mr. MANDER: Surely it is the custom for majorities to rule in this country.

Mr. BEAUMONT: The hon. Member's party is always on the look-out to safeguard the rights of minorities. It was an interesting moment to-day when I saw him on the side of the majorities. I do not think that anybody would deny the principles which I have just laid down as those behind the Bill. What, however, we have to decide, and what this House has very carefully to consider, is whether this method is the best way of dealing with the situation. The advantages have been stated very fully, very clearly and very fairly by the supporters of the Bill, but the disadvantages or dangers have been rather lightly thrust aside. In the first place, one of the misfortunes of industry in this country has, on the whole, been that those in charge of the organisations on both sides of an industry—I am not specifying the cotton industry, Because I do not pretend to know anything about it as such—have not as a rule been drawn from the wisest or the ablest of the men in that industry. It has been made abundantly clear again and again that a great deal could have been done for various industries in this country if the different associations representing employers and employed had been more reasonable and less obscurantist, and had in fact represented more accurately the majority of their members. It is to those organisations that we are about to give the power in this case.
I hope that the Minister, in observing the working of this Bill when it becomes an Act—as I have no doubt it will—will study very carefully whether it is upholding its usefulness, and whether there is
any remedy to ensure that the case for the majority is handled and presented by the people who really represent the majority and not by the people who, by their positions, merely say that they do. There is also a danger, which was stressed by my hon. Friend the Member for South Croydon (Mr. H. Williams), and which is a very real one, that new methods, new ideas may be introduced by a minority; the majority may oppose them, and then those methods and ideas, which might, if carried into effect, have meant the saving of the industry, may be turned down because the majority are too unwise and obscurantist to adopt them. That is a very real danger and one against which it is necessary to guard. What we have to do if we are to develop this system is to see that those who have at heart the interests of the industry as a whole, and not those of a small section, are the persons who have the power of ruling the industry. I am a little doubtful whether this Bill does that. It stresses too much the question of an organised majority; it may put too much power in their hands.
I am not going to vote against this Measure. It would not be right for anyone unconnected with the cotton trade or with that part of the country to oppose in the Division Lobby a Measure so obviously and universally desired by all those who are intimately connected with it. The hon. Member for East Wolverhampton said that he believed that this Bill would work well. I sincerely hope so, but I am very glad that it is a temporary Measure. We must have time to observe its working, to see where, if anywhere—it may be nowhere and all these fears may be illusory—a mistake has been made. When and if we impose codes of this kind—and it is probably the feeling of many hon. Members that in future the codes will not only deal with wages but will also deal with other conditions—we must see that the people who are administering them are really the people who are the best fitted to do so. An old Parliamentary friend of mine told me when I first come to this House that when a Bill was agreed upon by the two Front Benches it was almost certain to be a bad Bill. This Bill suffers not only from that stigma, but also from the support of the largest Liberal front in the
House. Even so, while I am a little frightened of its detail, and that we may be content to stabilise old-fashioned inefficiency and obscurantism instead of to destroy them, I only hope that the hon. Member for East Wolverhampton will prove right and that this Bill, which I do not suppose will be opposed in the Division Lobby, will have great success.

7.15 p.m.

Mr. RHYS DAVIES: I have listened to the whole of this very interesting Debate, and I am very pleased at the reception the Bill has received from all sides of the House. I am delighted to see the Secretary for Mines in his place listening very attentively to our discussion to-day, because I am hoping that he may be taking in some of these suggestions about legalising wages agreements with which perhaps he or his successor may be confronted at some future date. And now I come to the Bill itself. Hon. Members who have had any apprehensions about its provisions must be indeed greatly mistaken. There is one issue which has not been mentioned before in the Debate, yet in my opinion it is perhaps the most important of all. Hon. Members will be interested to learn that in the weaving section of the cotton trade of Lancashire and the surrounding townships about 60 per cent. of the operatives are women. What we are doing to-day, therefore, is not merely giving legal clothing to a wage agreement; we are in fact rescuing some women weavers of Lancashire and the surrounding towns from the very serious position in which they have found themselves on more than one occasion. Therefore, the Bill is very important because, as is known to all, the woman is more easily exploited by a bad employer than the man.
Let me add a word in support of the argument which was put forward by the hon. Member for Skipton (Mr. Rickards), who knows this business very much better than most of us. Although I do not know very much about the cotton industry, there are a number of mills in my Division. I can assure the House that in certain Lancashire villages with say, half-a-dozen mills, where five of the employers owning the mills will play the game towards their workpeople and carry out the agreements of the employers and
the trade unions, and the other employer is too stiff to follow suit, the results are such that they embitter not only the social and church life of the village, but some of the family circles as well. Hon. Gentlemen really must understand that the cotton industry of Lancashire in many respects differs fundamentally in its social conceptions from that of coal, engineering, or shipbuilding.
I will now pass to the actual merits of the Bill. The Hon. Member for South Croydon (Mr. H. Williams) has indeed contributed something to our discussion to-day. Were it not for his intervention, I am afraid that the Bill would have passed the Second Reading already. He made the statement that this was the worst Bill that has been introduced into this House. I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman's great fund of information, and I consequently hope that he will not be offended when I say that, if this is the worst Bill that has been introduced in this Parliament, he has to-day delivered the worst speech that he has ever uttered. I have never heard such foolish arguments from him before. The substance of the hon. Gentleman's argument was that if we passed this Bill to-day to clothe in legal enactment a voluntary agreement on wages, it would stifle all invention and progress in the cotton industry.

Mr. H. WILLIAMS: The Bill does not propose to do that; it proposes something quite different.

Mr. DAVIES: The hon. Gentleman is continually correcting hon. Members who refer to his speech. He is apparently ashamed of what he has said. Let him listen, therefore, to one who thinks that he has a better memory than what he possesses. It is quite common, by the way, for a listener to remember things said by a speaker better than the speaker remembers them himself. His argument was, in short, that if you legalise these voluntary wage agreements you could not hope for success and progress consequent upon the operation of new inventions. If he had told us exactly what was in his mind he would have said that the employer ought to be entitled to exploit his workpeople to the utmost extent and to sweat them too if he liked.

Mr. H. WILLIAMS: The hon. Member has no right to put words into my mouth which I did not use. A previous speaker did the same thing, and I took the opportunity of correcting him and explaining exactly what I meant.

Mr. DAVIES: I am not putting words into the mouth of the hon. Gentleman; I am just trying to picture his mind. I am on occasions a good artist at that Let me follow that point, because it is very important in connection with this Measure. I will give an illustration which contradicts the argument of the hon. Gentleman. I had the privilege and honour in 1916 to organise and lead a strike of 250 women laundry workers, They were all adult women, and the wages they were being paid in the sunny West of England for 60 hours a week was 6s. 6d. It was because of the terribly low wages that were being paid in the laundry trade of that day that a Trade Board for that trade was established. My answer to the hon. Gentleman is that I know of no industry in this country which has developed more rapidly and progressed more scientifically, after the establishment of Trade Board wages, than the laundry industry. Consequently it is not true to say that if you stabilise wages by the methods of a Bill of this kind that it will prevent progress in the industry.
There is one question which I want to ask the Minister of Labour. Incidentally, I was pleased with the speech of the hon. Gentleman below the Gangway about the names of those little townships. Being a Lancashire man myself I rather relished the reference to those names. It is astonishing how we Lancashire folk cling together. From the list of townships given in the Schedule to the Bill, I take it that they are districts in which employers and employed are in local associations, and that they are bound together in one federation at the top as it were? Will the wages agreements covered by Orders made under this Bill when it is an Act of Parliament be wages agreements in respect of each district, or will they be agreements covering the whole of the county and the surrounding townships in Cheshire and Yorkshire? That matter is very important as far as this Measure is concerned. I ought to add that the official Labour Opposition is in
favour of this Measure. It is, of course, an innovation. It is a new thing in so far as the law of the land is concerned to bring legal sanction to bear on the enforcement of voluntary wage agreements.
I am willing to confess right away that I regard the Bill as very much more important than what would appear on the surface. It may be that we are beginning a new era in connection with wage agreements. The hon. Gentleman the Member for East Wolverhampton (Mr. Mander) said that he thought the Bill ought to cover something besides wages. I take it that the answer to that point is that, if the employers and the operatives had been desirous of including not only wages, but hours of labour and conditions of employment as well, probably the Minister would have included both. The only answer therefore on that score is that neither employers nor employed want at the moment legal sanction to anything outside wages agreements. I take it also that if employers and employed in any other industry in the future want similar legal sanction, once we have passed this Bill, no Government can decline a request in respect to a similar application from any other industry. We have therefore reached a stage when the State is beginning a new venture in reference to industrial relations.
But it is very unfortunate indeed that this sort of thing has become necessary at all. I regret the causes which have given rise to the demand for this Bill. Before the present trade depression the word of the Lancashire cotton magnate to his workpeople was his bond, and the smaller mill-owner followed in the footsteps of the big mill-owner on all occasions and implemented agreements made between employers and employed without any trouble at all. Unfortunately that is not the case to-day. There are cases, as I have already indicated, in which a great deal of bitterness has been introduced in some of the townships of Lancashire because of the violation of agreements, and I welcome the Bill therefore in order that it may remove some of those terrible social consequences with which I have become acquainted on more than one occasion. It will be remembered that the Lancashire cotton industry is
meeting with severe competition in the markets of the world. It is however very wrong that any Member of this House should try to depreciate the importance of this industry. I have heard speeches in this House to-day which seemed to indicate that this industry has so declined that it is practically the smallest industry of its kind in the world. As a matter of fact, that is very far from being the case. I will quote figures to show the difference between the size of the Lancashire cotton industry and the cotton industry in other countries. Take the total estimated number of cotton spindles in the countries of the world. In Great Britain the number is 47,952,000, in France 10,000,000, in Germany 9,000,000. When we talk of the size of the Lancashire cotton industry in proportion to that of Japan it astonishes me to find that whereas we have nearly 48,000,000 cotton spindles, Japan, with all the noise that is made about her, only possesses 8,641,000 such spindles. Therefore, although this Lancashire industry has declined to about one-third of its production of a few years ago, it is still by far the largest cotton industry in the world.

Mr. PIKE: Has the hon. Member comparable figures of the number of spindles working in Britain and in Japan?

Mr. DAVIES: I thought that the hon. Member would know more about the subject than I do, otherwise I would have given him the figures already. This Bill raises the question of good faith in matters of bargain and promise and it fits in very well with some statements that I have read from time to time uttered by men who understand the law very much better than I do. One eminent person said that those who desire to be assured of getting anything that is promised must either exact an oath, or a pledge, or embody the promise in legal enactments. As I have said, I am very sorry that it should have become necessary to give these agreements the sanction of law in this fashion and that it has been found necessary to take action to bring offenders before the court so that they may be fined for not carrying out agreements; but we have reached that stage at last.
I feel sure of one thing, and that is that the mere introduction of the Bill will already have had a salutary effect upon those employers who are not play-
ing the game. It is not the very large employer as a rule who fails; it is the small employer, who will not join the employers' association and who has a great deal of undue influence with his employes. On occasion, I understand, he can induce his employés to agree with him to contract out from the trade union and from the employers' association as well. That is literal anarchy and we ought to do all we can to prevent that state of affairs from continuing. The situation is a very bad one at the moment. Representing a Lancashire constituency in which some cotton mills still remain, I feel sure I am voicing the opinions of the employers and the workpeople there—and they are among the best in the Lancashire cotton industry—when I say that they welcome the Measure and desire that when it becomes an Act of Parliament it will not be sufficient merely to see it on the Statute Book, but that its provisions shall be applied without any fear or favour.

7.35 p.m.

Sir H. BETTERTON: I can only speak for a second time by leave of the House. I should like, in a few sentences, to reply to this most interesting Debate. I confess that I am extremely gratified with the reception of the Bill. It is, as has been said, an innovation, and I doubt if ever a Bill which could be described as an innovation has been received with such warmth and unanimity. The right hon. Member for Wakefield (Mr. Greenwood) semed to be almost embarrassed because he was in agrement with me. I am sorry he should feel that way about it, and I hope that he has found the experience so agreeable and stimulating that he will repeat it. The supporters of the Bill have been honourable Members from Lancashire, Yorkshire, and other districts in whose Divisions the cotton industry is situated. We have had speeches in support from the hon. Member for Westhoughton (Mr. Rhys Davies), the hon. Member for Skipton (M. Rickard), the hon. Member for Sowerby (Mr. McCorquodale), the hon. Member for Royton (Mr. Sutcliffe), the hon. Member for Bolton (Mr. Entwistle), the hon. Member for West Salford (Commander Astbury), the hon. Member for Stockport (Mr. Hammersley), the hon. Member for Oldham (Mr. Hamilton Kerr), the hon. Member for Leigh (Mr. Tinker), and
others. All of them, without any exception, said in almost identical language that they regard this Bill as one which will be of the greatest value to the great industry which they represent.
On the other side we have had criticisms from my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Mr. H. Williams), from my hon. Friend the Member for South-East Essex (Mr. Raikes), my hon. Friend the Member for Penrhyn and Falmouth (Mr. Petherick), and my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Mr. M. Beaumont). I confess that if one compares—I say this without disrespect—the qualifications of those who come from Lancashire and the areas where this great industry is carried on, with those of the critics of the Measure, it must be admitted that their qualifications in this matter at any rate surpass those of the four hon. Gentlemen to whom I have referred. The arguments of my hon. Friend the Member for South Croydon have been answered over and over again in the Debate, and lastly and most effectively by the hon. Member for Westhoughton. Whether this Bill be an innovation or not, it is quite certain that the arguments of my hon. Friend the Member for South Croydon are as old as the hills. They were the arguments that were used by the laissez faire doctrinaire in the days of Cobden and Bright. Perhaps my hon. Friend wished to out-Bright Bright in his doctrines. They are also exactly the arguments that were advanced against the two Trade Boards Acts, the Act that was passed before the War, I think in 1909, and the extension of the Trade Boards Act after the War. Such arguments are perfectly familiar to us and they are arguments which at the present day seem to be just as dead as Mr. Bright himself.
One point was raised by the hon. Member for Leigh with regard to arrears of pay. He asked whether the point that he raised is covered by Clause 3, paragraph (b). It is not covered by paragraph (b) but by paragraph (a). With regard to the scope of the Bill, that was a point which I discussed at considerable length with the representatives of the employers and operatives when we considered the form of the Bill. The scope is the scope which was agreed with them, and they are perfectly satisfied with it. If it is a scope which satisfies those who are most affected by the operations of
the Bill, I am prepared to accept it. If, in Committee, any good reason may be advanced why it should be altered, one can consider it, but I shall be very loth to alter it without the full approval of the organisations concerned.
The hon. Member for Westhoughton asked whether the agreements relating to conditions in one area could be made obligatory. The answer is "Yes," but only if the central organisation confirms them, and makes them the subject of an application. The local organisation cannot themselves apply but the application will be made through the central organisation. There is only one further question with which I want to deal, and that is the question of minorities and the rights of minorities. We have been most careful to meet that point, which has been raised in more than one speech. It will be the business of the board, before making recommendations to the Ministry, to consider first of all the size of the minority and the importance which should be attached to the minority. That is exactly one of the things which they will take into consideraiton before making their Report on which the Minister will act.

Mr. MANDER: Will the right hon. Gentleman make it clear that the £10 fine applies to each payment to each person?

Sir H. BETTERTON: I think that is perfectly clear. If the hon. Member will look at the wording of the Clause, it says :
if any employer pays to a person employed in the industry of a class affected by the agreement wages at a rate less than the rate applicable in his case under the order, the employer shall be liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding ten pounds.
That, clearly, does not mean that the fine of £10 would cover, say, 200 persons. Quite clearly it applies to one person.

Mr. CHORLTON: Will the right hon. Gentleman give a little further definition of a minority? Is he prepared to put any guidance into the Bill in Committee on this point, because there is an outstanding fear lest a large minority might not be taken sufficiently into account. Some guidance would be very useful.

Sir H. BETTERTON: I will consider that matter before the Committee stage but as at present advised, I think that the wording of Clause 1 (4) covers that point :
If the board is satisfied that the said organisations were 60 representative as aforesaid the board shall inquire whether it is expedient that an Order be made under this Act, and shall, as soon as possible, make to the Minister its report which, however, shall not contain a recommendation that such an Order be made unless the board is unanimous in making that recommendation. 
It is clearly the business of the board to consider the representation of minorities and to satisfy itself that the representation is such that it would make it inexpedient for an order to be to be made. However, I will look into the point; I think it is covered.

Mr. PIKE: Do I understand that before an agreement can be ratified it will have to be sanctioned by the central authority? The largest organisations in the area are representative of employers and employed. Does it mean in effect that the central authority, apart from local organisations, will lay down the definite terms so far as wage agreements are concerned?

Sir H. BETTERTON: I do not think there is any substance in the point raised by the hon. Member. As I understand it, a wage agreement in respect of each application will be an agreement made by the central organisation and when it is brought before the Minister for confirmation it comes within the purview of the Bill. If the hon. Member's question is whether local organisations can themselves apply, I should say that the answer is no.

Mr. PIKE: There are certain areas named in the Schedule. Are they to be representative of individual organisations? If they can, I want to be sure that they cannot represent individual and different demands.

Question, "That the words proposed to be left out stand part of the Question," put, and agreed to.

Bill read a. Second time.

Bill committed to a Committee of the Whole House for Tuesday, 29th May.—[Sir A. Lambert Ward.]

COTTON MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY (TEMPORARY PROVISIONS) [MONEY].

Considered in Committee, under Standing Order No. 69.

[Sir DENNIS HERBERT in the Chair.]

Motion made, and Question proposed :
That, for the purposes of any Act of the present Session to make temporary provision for enabling statutory effect to be given to rates of wages agreed between representative organisations in the cotton manufacturing industry and for purposes connected with the matter aforesaid, it is expedient to provide for the payment out of moneys provided by Parliament of such fees to members of any board appointed under the said Act and such expenses in connection with the proceedings of any such board as may be determined by the Minister of Labour with the consent of the Treasury."—(King's Recommendation signified.)—[Sir H. Betterton.]

7.51 p.m.

Sir H. BETTERTON: The Money Resolution is necessitated by Clause 6, which says :
There shall be paid out of moneys provided by Parliament such fees to members of any board appointed under this Act and such expenses in connection with the proceedings of any such board as may be determined by the Minister with the consent of the Treasury.
The necessity for the Financial Resolution is a little more than technical. It is to enable the Treasury, of course, to provide for the expenses of the board. I have made full inquiries into this matter and I am advised that it is not likely that the expenses will come to more than a few hundreds of pounds a year, it depends on how often the board have the full independence of the board, e to meet. But I think it is better, in order to preserve that the expenses, small though they will be, should be paid by the Treasury rather than by the industry. If they are paid by the Treasury there is no question of it being an independent board.

Question put, and agreed to.

Resolution to be reported upon Tuesday, 29th May.

MINES (WORKING FACILITIES) BILL [Lords].

Order for Second Reading read.

7.53 p.m.

The SECRETARY for MINES (Mr. Ernest Brown): I beg to move, "That the Bill be now read a Second time."
I am sure that I shall be consulting the wishes of the House if I do not take a long time in explaining the purpose, scope and form of this small but, as regards the metalifferous mines, most important Bill. As a result of the recommendations of the Committee appointed in 1919, with Sir Leslie Scott as Chairman, it was pointed out that as regards minerals there were great obstacles in the way of their full working, and, therefore, the Act of 1923 was passed, which applied to all minerals. In the course of the working of that Act—a very successful working—it was discovered that there were certain difficulties with regard to coal. This was brought before the Government and in 1926 an amending Act was passed extending the 1923 Act in three respects. In the first place, it extended it so that instead of only persons with an interest in the minerals having the right to make an application to the tribunal, which is the Railway and Canal Commission, a most able and impartial tribunal, any person may make an application. Secondly, under the original Bill it was necessary that the person making the application must prove that minerals were in danger of being left permanently unworked. That was omitted by the 1926 Act, and, in the third place, there was a provision giving power to modify or to annul restrictions, terms and conditions in mining leases which prevented coal being worked efficiently or economically. That applied to coal only and it has worked well, with general approval, since 1926 to the great advantage of the coal industry.
A committee set up in 1920 to advise as to the development of metalliferous mines and quarries was asked in 1931 to make a report as to what was necessary, and in 1932 they produced a report. One of the major recommendations calling for legislation is contained in the Bill—namely, to give to metalliferous minerals contained in the Schedule to the Bill, which went through another place without opposition and without amendment, the same facilities already enjoyed by coal under the Act of 1926. Hon. Members must understand that there is one over-riding necessity—namely, that those who make the application must prove to the Railway and Canal Commission that it is in the national interest
that powers should be put into operation. Anybody who has seen the working of the 1923 Act in regard to all minerals, and the amending Act of 1926 in regard to the coal industry, will agree that they are for the good of the industry; and since the Advisory Committee have recommended it we now ask, in the form of an Amendment to Section 13 of the 1926 Act, that the amendment should be made. It is desired by the industry. Hon. Members will see that the Bill applies to metalliferous minerals and to oil shale. I do not think I need detain the House any longer, but I shall be glad to answer any point that any hon. Member may wish to raise.

7.55 p.m.

Mr. DAGGAR: I do not know whether this Bill will arouse as much suspicion as the Measure the House has just passed, but as there are not many hon. Members present it is quite safe for me to intimate that we on these benches have no desire to oppose it. It is but a small Measure, although it contains a principle of some importance, if not of great importance. At the same time hon. Members opposite will not expect us to get excited or enthusiastic over its provisions. It is a Measure which grants facilities for the search for and the working of minerals. At the same time, we should be lacking in our duty if we declined to assist any effort which serves as a means of finding employment for those who require it. Such observations might probably excite opposition and hostility to the Bill from other quarters of the House, but they will not seriously affect its passage into law. The Bill I submit is evidence, if evidence was needed, of the slow working of the Parliamentary machine. It has its genesis in the report of the committee set up under the Mining Industry Act, 1920, which no doubt was itself the result of numerous inquiries and commissions. But nothing in this direction was achieved until the operation of the Act of 1923. I see in this Bill the same laborious machinery. I am aware of the improvements made by the Mining Industry Act, 1926, but I still consider it a scandal that such cumbrous methods have to be employed before the right to work minerals can be obtained. It demonstrates how slowly the interests of
the community are considered as against the interests of private individuals.
I gather that the Bill is due to the recommendation of the Advisory Committee on Metalliferous Mines, to which the Secretary for Mines has referred, which was submitted to the Government in May, 1932. It will give legislative effect to some of their recommendations. I imagine that the Bill will soon reach the Statute Book because the recommendations of the committee are made on the ground that some action should be taken to develop sections of the metalliferous mining industry, and that it is in the interests of the country to do so as it provides employment. The last consideration should, in my opinion, entitle it to receive the support of this House. The advisory committee was requested to deal with the question by Mr. E. Shinwell, then Secretary for Mines, and the committee stated that it was anxious to do anything possible to help the industry, although any developments would be at the expense of imports.
That is a distinct and definite recognition of the need of improving the home market and exploiting our national resources. The importance of doing so can be gathered from the fact that the average annual output of iron ore and ironstone from 1873 to 1882 was over 16,000,000 tons, and in 1931 only a little over 7,500,000 tons. If it is contended that that period is too early for comparison, let me mention that the output for 1929 was 13,000,000 tons. The report states that there are large iron ore resources in Cumberland, Lancashire and other places, and that those resources should be developed. As miners, we should object to the importation of coal, and as public representatives we object to the importation of iron ore if it is possible to mine it here. I wish it were possible to estimate the number of persons who "light be employed if this Bill becomes law. I say this because I was amazed to discover the extent to which in this industry the machine has already displaced men, or, to put it more accurately, the extent to which the output is being reduced, but not in proportion to the number of men displaced. I find that while the total output of iron and ironstone during 1929 showed a decrease of not less than 12 per cent. compared with the average for the period 1909–1913, the
corresponding decrease in the number of persons employed was 43 per cent. I wish it had been possible for the Minister to have dealt with another problem. On page 7 of the report the statement is to be found :
In some instances the rates of royalty charged constitute an undue burden on. the industry. In addition the terms of some mining leases with regard to the restoration of the surface frequently impose on mineowners the necessity for expenditure considerably in excess of the value of the land for agricultural purposes.
The report also says that in order to provide the means of overcoming these disadvantages they recommend that Section 13 of the Mining Industries Act of 1926 should be extended to apply to metalliferous minerals.

Mr. E. BROWN: It is also covered. The 1926 Act did it, and this Bill effects the same object.

Mr. DAGGAR: That is the point I want to stress. As miners' representatives we are aware of the incubus of royalties as far as the extraction of coal is concerned. I am aware that in the Bill provision is made for Section 13 of the 1926 Act to be embodied, but I want some evidence that Section 13 of the Mining Industry Act of 1926 has had the effect of removing the unnecessary and unjust burden of rates of royalty as far as the mining of coal is concerned. Then we should be in the fortunate position of being able to say that we are supporting this Measure because it will have a similar effect. I make that statement because the report emphasises the disadvantages of these payments. The Bill does not specifically provide any method for dealing with this problem in the manner that some of us would desire. While the Bill is not all that we desire we nevertheless do not intend to oppose it.

8.8 p.m.

Lieut.-Commander AGNEW: I wish as briefly as possible to give my support to this short Bill. As the Minister has said, it contains no revolutionary principle but is an extension of an existing principle to another series of minerals as contained in the Schedule. My constituency is one that is specially interested, in view of the fact that one of the minerals mentioned, tin, is almost entirely mined in it. I appreciate that the Bill will add what is most sorely needed, that is one more facility towards making it possible
to mine tin. Anyone who has had even conversations with mining men, whether in metalliferous mining or in coal, knows the extraordinary difficulties that arise when old workings and leases become so mixed together that it is almost impossible for a genuine man with capital, who wishes to extract the minerals from a particular area, to get a reasonable lease that will enable him to do it.
This Bill, of course, while not dealing with that specific point, nevertheless has one overriding provision attached to it, and that is that where the applicants show that it is in the national interest that these minerals should be worked, permission will be granted by the Rail-way and Canal Commission. It will be within the memory of hon. Members that during the great War we were very short of minerals of the rarer kind, such as tin and copper, which could not be imported owing to the submarine menace. Then it was ruled that the national interest was paramount, and the eyes almost were picked out of many of the metalliferous mines of this country. Since then the tin industry has known many depressions, and it is now just showing signs of some recovery. I believe that this Bill will add a substantial facility towards the recovery of the industry. The Bill arises out of the report which the Minister has mentioned, and it is of special interest to me to give support to the Bill because the Chairman of the advisory committee that recommended it is a Camborne mining engineer of great experience, Mr. Arthur Thomas. I hope that the advantages expected to arise from the passage of the Bill will be substantially realised.

8.10 p.m.

Mr. DAVID DAVIES: I wish to direct the attention of the Secretary for Mines to the position of the iron ore mines in this country. While iron ore is in the Schedule, if the Bill is passed it will not include to any extent the facilities that are needed in the iron ore field in my area. We have an unlimited iron field, the best ore in the world, hematite iron ore. The policy of the Government has been to devote its attention to the restoration of men to employment, but we have seen gradually in that area a restriction of employment. Men have gradually been withdrawn. From working 1,000 men regularly we are now working 300 intermittently. It is in the national
interest to have men in employment, and the Government should turn its attention to restricting the enormous imports of foreign ore into this country, and so enable the ore that is lying dormant here to be extracted by the men in this country. I regard this matter as exceedingly important. We have not only 1,000 men thrown out of employment, but we have the potentiality for absorbing another 10,000 men if necessary, and their output could be absorbed in the steel industry of this country if we had patriotism amongst the steel owners. But the steel owners have their interests abroad and prefer to bring the ore here from all the corners of the earth rather than employ our own men. It is not that that is economic, but because their financial interests are in other parts of the world. They bring that material here and exclude our own men from work. The Government should protect the iron ore people of this country and prevent the exploitation of ore from abroad.

8.12 p.m.

Dr. O'DONOVAN: I hope the Minister will be able to give me a few minutes of his time to explain why this Schedule is such a short one. Many of the Members here are new Members and need some short explanation. I fully realise that this Bill has a history and the schedule is the result of careful departmental work, of which the Minister showed such mastery in his opening remarks; but this knowledge is not possessed by new Members. There are two points on which I would like to ask him for information. The arsenic industry is of very great importance. There are arsenical ore deposits in this country, and I would like to know whether that matter has been thoroughly gone into before excluding arsenic. Another mineral question of great professional interest to me and to others is the exploitation of radio-active mineral deposits such as pitch blende. I do not know whether these last have come into prominence since this matter was investigated, but I should be glad if the Minister would inquire and let me know.

Mr. BROWN: In answer to the hon. Member for Mile End (Dr. O'Donovan) I may say that we have only included in the Schedule those minerals which have been carefully considered in the
manner already indicated, but I will note what the hon. Member has said.

Question put, and agreed to.

Bill read a Second time, and committed to a Standing Committee.

LAND SETTLEMENT (SCOTLAND) BILL.

Not amended (in the Standing Committee), considered.

Mr. DEPUTY - SPEAKER (Captain Bourne): The proposed new Clause—(Powers of land court)—which stands on the Order Paper in the name of the right hon. and gallant Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Major Sir A. Sinclair) and other hon. Members, is outside the scope of the Bill

8.16 p.m.

Sir ROBERT HAMILTON: I do not wish to contest your Ruling, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, and I appreciate the difficulty which arises in putting down Amendments to what is essentially a Money Bill. At the same time, I would bring to your notice the fact that under this Money Bill there is an admitted change of policy, and this Amendment was put on the Paper with the object of raising one of the points relating to that matter. I realise that the new Clause is out of order on the present occasion, but I take this opportunity of expressing the hope that on the Third Reading of the Bill we may have a wider opportunity of referring to what is being done in this Money Bill.
Bill ordered to be read the Third time upon Tuesday, 29th May.

ASSESSOR OF PUBLIC UNDERTAKINGS (SCOTLAND) BILL [Lords].

Not amended (in the Standing Committee), considered; King's Consent signified; Bill read the Third time, and passed, without Amendment.

The remaining Orders were read, and postponed.

ADJOURNMENT.

Resolved, "That this House do now adjourn."—[Mr. Womrsley.]

Adjourned accordingly at Seventeen Minutes after Eight o'Clock.